This work is a cracked mirror held up to the world I’m breathing in - the one where I’m standing on the edge of my own sanity, watching everyone else step cheerfully off the cliff ahead of me. The Matrix reality-versus-illusion argument is dead. Most people would rather stay blissfully plugged in. We’ve slipped into a full-blown Twilight Zone episode where the patients overpowered the orderlies and now the lunatics are running the asylum. My work isn’t speculating about some dystopian tomorrow. It’s the present, exactly as it hits - waiting for the next distraction, coping mechanism, or ritual to drip-feed a sense of purpose.
Everyone looks stripped down and slightly feral to me, piecing together their mental health like a jigsaw puzzle missing half the pieces. They rummage through the spiritual flea market - black cats, shattered mirrors, vision boards, astrology apps - desperate for anything that feels like a cheat code to meaning. It isn’t faith. It’s panic-shopping for hope.
This is why I created the figures dancing around the fire in symbolic ceremony. Each glowing symbol lifts into the dark like a prayer tossed upward with crossed fingers. When the spiritual mall closes for the night, the coping mechanisms take over. The main character smokes an opium pipe, releasing purple smoke that stands in for every form of escape. Drugs. Alcohol. Food. Netflix. Binge. Relax. All of it aimed at the same thing - softening the weight of staying conscious. None of it is joy. It’s just trying to survive another night without taking the full hit of being awake.
Beyond the main character, the background moves into extremes. Protesters stand holding picket signs where blunt contradictions are left naked. Beneath a bleeding goat, two dolls drink its blood like communion wine. It’s my exaggerated artist statement of what the world looks like when fear overrides reason and belief hardens into obsession.
Created through layered digital collage, photographic manipulation, AI generation, and meticulous lighting passes, this work confronts the seductive numbness of consumption culture, the commodification of pain and outrage, and the hollow prayers we offer just to make it through another day. Making the piece became its own coping mechanism - binging time inside the work from the moment I wake until I fall asleep, giving myself a pause, a breath in and out, a brief release from the noise. Decadent apathy wrapped in vibrant, unsettling beauty.
