This ongoing series of portraits depicts prominent Americans who have embodied the American dream and whose lives were eventually cut short by AIDS. Shown mostly as children to capitalize on the beauty of youth (and their future celebrity) these images convey a certain hope and promise for the future. The subjects here include Robert Reed (who played Mike Brady on the Brady Bunch), Alvin Ailey, and Rock Hudson. On close inspection, the perfectionism of the rendering comes undone, illusion dissolving into line and pattern, suggesting the tenuousness of idealism. The ephemeral nature of the lives and objects depicted, and the paper on which they are printed, is reinforced by the immateriality of the digital, resulting in a complex interplay between permanence and impermanence, mortality and immortality, dream and reality.