VOLATILE SYSTEM

The orange:

These three pieces are rooted deeply in eco-brutalism. The venom-like orange drips menacing and foreboding, equal parts inspired by soviet brutalist architecture and the chaos magic practice of sigil crafting.

The urge to create a symbol that manifests something into reality, a sign that MEANS SOMETHING, while not universal, is a common desire. It is a practice that, I personally feel helps me to connect to the past while planning for my future.

Many people find brutalist architecture to be boring, ugly, an eyesore. There will be photos of blank, featureless soviet buildings, with no inhabitants or surroundings,and all anyone can say is, oh, how ugly. However, to me, these don't exist in a vacuum. A granny will put a flowerbox on her balcony. Another neighbor will hang up the laundry to dry. Maybe you'll get moss or some green climbing thing growing. Maybe some seeds will take root in the cracks of the cheap, shoddily made concrete. People will be born there, live there, die there, and the echoes of their laughter and the stains of their tears will color the walls and the stairwells.

I felt the urge to bring brutalist architecture and chaos magic mysticism together, to symbolize that no matter how far forward we will push, how far away we will go from the organic shapes and colors of life, we will always feel the urge to look up at the sky to make a wish on a shooting star, to influence the world around us, to make a connection with a higher consciousness, to take a physical step toward making our dreams come alive.

I also was visually inspired by apocalyptic scenes, especially those from 90s anime and manga, where skeletons of ruined buildings rise up from dust and the abyss. Think X/1999, Evangelion, the Legend of Basara, or even more modern examples such as the gorgeous ruins in My Time at Portia.

The greenery also is meant to bring forth the organic, the natural, the growth and healing and our origins. The trees, the forests, the orchards. The things that grow, an easy and clear symbol of things that come from the earth.

Titles

The titles are jamais vu (a volatile system), deja vu (blood and apricots), and presque vu (the stars are afraid of you)

The titles are a two part equation - one half deals with the common human experience of unreliable nature of memory and the other half, with the much awaited apocalypse.

Jamais Vu (as you Disco Elysium folks may know) is the sensation of encountering a place /situation/moment you have lived through previously, and yet having no memory of it.

Deja Vu, the most easily explained, is the sensation of having been here before, though you have never been here previously.

Presque Vu is the sensation of almost, but never, remember what it is you've forgotten. It's at the tip of your tongue, you can almost taste it, but it just isn't coming to you.

These feelings have been experienced by every human who has lived, and every human who will come after.

The secondary parts of each title come from a certain conversation 🦗from the end of Disco Elysium. It is a conversation that discusses the end times.

Also - how many apocalypses have we humans lived through? Our worlds have ended a thousand times over. Yet here we still are, and here we'll remain.

During the process of coming up with the names of these pieces, I definitely had at least an hour long meltdown over what direction to take them in, so Uhh shout out to my Disco buds who were there for me in my darkest hour, when I actually had to name something.

I wanted to bring a bit of Disco to these pieces, because Disco has brought a bit of Disco into me.

The colors:

A soft sky blue, labeled at the store as "Aztec blue". So many native cultures, slaughtered in the name of expansion of empires and growth of wealth, and now in the paint aisle at the hardware store. It's a little weird. The blue was the prefect shade though, for what I wanted out of this.

Multichrome and metallic blues add dimension to an otherwise flat sky

The greens... I used about 10-15 different acrylic paints in various shades to create the depth and dimension of the leaves.

Orange - neon, vivid, acidic, venomous, vibrant, violent. The antithesis of a natural color. Glows ominously under blue lights.

All together

Together these pieces are a visualization of the past, present, and future of humanity. It contains the roots of our past, the promise of future apocalypses brought on by our own actions, and a hope for a future that we can build to our own imagination. It's a discussion of the unreliability of our memory, and the common things that bind us together.

If you have any questions let me know! Thanks for checking out my work!