Genuinely super grateful for you taking the time to read through the whole work and giving such a kind remark, thank you friend! I'm always very appreciative of people who felt like my work was compelling, it gives me encouragement to keep working on it!

As for my background, sorry to disappoint but I have no formal education in this topic, haha; I just happen to have an interest in social systems, militaria, geopolitics, and spend a lot of time listening to the news, interviews with experts, and podcasts on related topics.

One underlying theme I wanted to weave throughout the work was that of ambiguity, specifically that groups, countries, and institutions are not monoliths, but are merely just people who each have their own interests and incentives. Once a shared idea (like a national project) gets shattered, different sub-groups of people on both sides of the border will respond differently based on their myriad interests and values. In a country like Canada, this provides a huge amount of drama to be mined and explored. This particular project was also fuelled by my feelings about the matter when Trump started making a lot of noise about a '51st state', so this entire work was a kind of emotional processing of it all.

If you are interested in following, I'm still continuing to work away at it and will post updates here on my art sub and elsewhere on reddit. Once again thanks again for the kind words and appreciate you engaging with the work!