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Non-Commissioned Artwork |
Click any of the thumbnails to view the full-sized piece. Prints of all pieces are available through my deviantART print account; a link for each is provided. |
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Absent/Between: (Mal de Débarquement) Mal de débarquement is the feeling of imbalance after prolonged exposure to motion and travel. Of course, jet lag is the fatigue experienced by the disruption of our natural circadian rhythms, generally by strong time zone displacement. Worse, conditions such as the bends can cause death. We are oddly anchored creatures. |
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The Medicine Room Prior to modern medicine, doctors and healers determined much by the shape of a person's head with phrenology, or the balance of bodily "elements" such as bile. Often the severely mentally ill were subject to harsh abuse to rid them of their demonic possessors. Today, our brains are psychoactive soup bowls full of complacency-inducing drugs, and pharmaceutical corporations are poised for a new era of performance enhancers. Today, we still do not fix people, but we do fix their incomplacency and increase their productivity. |
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All the Wrong Ambitions Some are born with futures just splitting through their brains. They wear masks but those brains pulse and quiver madly behind them, dreaming up tomorrows sewn in their own godly hellfire. Monuments erected!--festivals thrown!--the entire world one well-oiled orgasmic machine and they are in the seat of it all. |
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Folie à Deux Folie à deux is a supposedly rare condition wherein a delusion is shared by two people; often, the folie imposée forms the delusion and imposes it upon another, the folie simultanée. More than two people may be involved--indeed, a folie à plusieurs literally means "the madness of many." Myself, I am not so sure about the rarity of this disorder. |
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Awaiting Her Decision A personal favorite, this is a direct and literal piece. |
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Just Say Stop These words are never meant; it is the mantra of abusers and addicts, meant for pacifying the terror of lost control. We are a generation proud of our mantras. |
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The Collector After finishing artwork for a band, I developed the piece further following a trip to New York City, where one is simultaneously awed and belittled by the awesome brilliance of Times Square. The monster films are superfluous--the place itself instills exhiliration and terror in the smallness of an individual man. There is an unseen force, some faceless entity flashing across every monolithic surface--holding back the banal, the tenements, and pushing the endless traffic of the entranced. |
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Thanatosis In the shift from accepting intelligent design to the evolutionary model, we've come to view our bodies as unholy circuity (not that the idea of design instilled any sense of human potential or individuality). A transhumanist, I am endlessly torn between the bright promises of the future and fear of the recklessness and devaluing of the self that is apparently part of our human nature, even when we are ironically at our most selfish. |
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Hyperrealist Concensus Hyperrealism is virtually unheard of. When we are led to believe that something is better than the "real thing," this is hyperrealism. Flavors that don't exist like arctic berry, the absorption of video games, store shelves faced to appear fully stocked, slogans like "sexier than sex itself"--entire cities are hyperreal, such as Las Vegas with its 24-hour daylight, fake currency to encourage overspending, and endless sprawl of entranced visitors escaping reality for the promise of striking it rich, legalized prostitution, and the motto, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Hyperrealism is virtually unheard of, but it opens us to our worst--when we can dream anything into being, the devils on our shoulder guide us. |
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Trash There is something strange to me about the commodification of the human body. It must simultaneously be sanctified as beautiful and desirable, but also disposable and as worthless as the next. Trash was my first attempt at my current style, completed around 2003, conjoining multiple bodies into an aesthetically pleasing composition that nonetheless remained random in appearance and whose individual parts appear to lack particular value. It was my first piece to successfully draw from my inspiration in Dadaism and Surrealism, but remain modern and distinctly digital. |
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Christ in a Fishbowl (Asleep) I began to be intensely interested in the motives behind the use of drugs, particularly psychedelics. Generally speaking, the scattered desire to fill gaping logistical holes ranging from the metaphysical to interpersonal relationships leads us to a sense of detachment from the self as we swim idly about our dirty mental fishbowls--leading to dissatisfaction and disillusionment with ourselves, fostering paranoia. |
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Christ in a Fishbowl (Awake) With the introduction of psychedelics we awaken and plug our logistical holes full of these paranoid delusions, bringing about our own salvation but providing no long-lasting solutions. We are still our own Christ in a fishbowl. |
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Tabula Media Rasa If we are indeed born with a "blank slate" it doesn't last for long. Before we can speak--before we can even crawl--our spirits are ground to dust under the universal message that love and acceptance comes from sex and spending, and spending is the only way to acquire sex and spending power. Following this, we are immediately instilled with the values of charity, chasticity, and modesty; our primary and sensual education slithers back to our stomachs, waiting for its orgiastic release in early adulthood. |
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The Somniloquist A somniloquist is one who speaks in their sleep, generally stuck in the dream cycle at night and acquiring little rest. I usually create art from what I see around me, not from myself. But I am a narcoleptic. |
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Cassandra the Mute This is no longer the age of seers and prophets. This is the age of warning symbols, terror levels, and pollution meters. This is the age where corporations and governments use these instruments to avoid meaningful dialogue on regulation, foreign policy and civil liberties, and environmental responsibility, respectively. The true Cassandras are indeed very mute. |
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Birth (Hot Pavement) I dreamed that I was walking down a sidewalk and it was impossible to not step on the many bird eggs that had fallen for as long as the stretch of sidewalk continued. I tried to escape through parking lots, but here they were heaping too. Everywhere, thousands of eggs were smashed apart with bits of feather and gel quivering. Before I awoke, I realized they were being thrown from nests by birds, and from the smashed eggs little human faces were emerging and burrowing into the ground or crawling up the trees. The birds resigned their egg-throwing efforts, and began incubating. |
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Evolver If we are not careful, we grow into the millions of things we would like to be for everyone else's sake, never taking any concrete form and are eventually willingly fed poison. Once you fall into this hole, the overabundance of sadists rejoice, for there is a shortage of masochists. They will pet you and call you pretty things, even be very gentlemanly or ladylike, as they do your evolving for you. |
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Maps (Or, Middlemen of the First and Third Worlds) A very literal piece of someone sitting indignantly at the edge of a scorched Earth, quite sure of their patriotism. Mind you, this is no politician. This is the common person, the true middlemen between the madmen and those at their mercy. This is the lobbyist, the financier, the journalist. The voter. This one, it seems, should have done some more research. |
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The Romancing Life is full of disgusting, brutal, powerful men licking up the dead and dying with cheers and congratulations on the sidelines. |
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Making Silver Rhyme with Orange I am for genetic engineering in careful, appropriate applications. But we cannot use it to make ourselves more peaceful, intelligent, or beautiful; it erases emotional value and diversity. If we forced silver to rhyme with orange, there would be no meaning behind a rhyme seeing as how it wouldn't just be an "adjustment," the way we see genetic engineering, because it would negate the basis of rhyming. Peace is found not by removing our capability for violence but by removing the stimuli that foster violence--removing the apparatus for violence removes the apparatus for appreciating peace. Rather than make everyone beautiful according to one perception of beauty, we should embrace diversity as beauty. We wouldn't appreciate individual or total human achievement or nuances of talent with the same standard--if high--capacities for learning. |
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Temporal Aliasing The more vibrant and ephemeral things are, the more they tend to repeat and all the colors fade to white. |
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Psychomanteum Some claim to speak with the dead. Some claim to speak with God. Some claim to be God. Some seek death. |
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Evening for a 5-Year Sunlight Created in 2007 for the 5th anniversary of the occupation of Iraq, as popular opinion fully shifted towards a concensus that Operation Iraqi Freedom was a miserably orchestrated digression into old imperialism at worst, and a costly, destabilizing mistake at best. Now the specter of freedom and independence hangs by a string in Iraq while Americans are left to question their own. Are we a beacon of hope or the enablers of monsters? |
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Between Walls (Addiction) My first piece utilizing transition. The three stages are replacing a part of oneself, loss of control, and loss of the self. I have seen many lives ruined this way. The pain and death are very real. |
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Candice A digitally airbrushed portrait of the love of my life. |
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Vorarephilia The love of eating others, for which there is too little vorarophobia. |
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Compressor The meat packing industry handles the slaughtering, processing and distribution of animals such as cattle, pigs, and sheep; and the indoctination, dressing and undressing, and distribution of youth, particularly young girls. The industry is primarily focused on producing meat for human consumption, but it also yields a variety of by-products including hides, feathers, dried blood, and, through the process of rendering, enormous wealth for aristocrats, advertisers, and druglords. |
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The Two-Dimensional Itch We convince ourselves that we are not the sum of our actions, but the constellations of running that we draw across the skies where our dreams once shined tell the truth. |
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Digital Hookah "Man is but a worm," an old caricature of Darwin's theories satirically announced, absurdly illustrating a worm evolving into an ape and then into Darwin himself. Perhaps that timeline is simply reversed. |
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Media Feed Al Gore quotes his advisors in The Assault on Reason, "'If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls.' I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%." This is the result of our one-way nationwide television "discussion." You are reflexive data. |
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Modernity You can dress a moth in beautiful colors, but it is still a moth. |
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Seduction A development of commissioned work. |
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Sex Symbol Drastically influenced by the Surrealists. Nothing is sexier, it seems, than a lack of control. |
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What it Means to Be a Woman There is a lot of discussion about the advancements of women's rights these days. Should there not be enough obvious evidence that it is mostly fluff, the staggering statistics are enough--the US Department of State estimates that each year, about 50,000 women and children are brought against their will to the United States for sexual exploitation (this number is very meager compared to that of other organizations). Sex toys are still Use #1 for women, and I think we are all quite aware of the persistance of the glass ceiling. What needs to change is the widespread juvenile perception that everything is a commodity; those in any kind of power, be it political or social or economic, will continue to be mostly men and wield their power poorly until this changes. |
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The Tourist Of course, the United States is not alone, and millions of Americans every year visit other countries where they will not be humiliated if recognized financing the sex trade by buying time with young girls and boys. Figures vary, but UNICEF estimates 1.75 million are trafficked per year, and the UN has varied between 1-4 million per year. |
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