A series of TV Monsters
TV Man Mongers
12”x24”, Pen, Marker on Bristol Board, 2021
The TV man stands monolithically above the sheep standing on trash piles below. This drawing is colored with markers in bright almost toxic hues. This drawing is a part of a larger series about our western culture that watches exorbitant amounts of television, drawn into a trance of fear and ignorance. The media disrupts our evolving world with the propaganda used to manipulate and distract from reality. This tool is used to propagate consumerism at the detriment of our environment and ultimately ourselves. As we are distracted and worked to the bone, shown false narratives which indulge our lowest instincts, the control of our lives become s ever more evident.
Above is an oil painting of this tv monster in deep blue hues. The spirit animals, almost fading into mist or perhaps degrading away as the people are plugged in their devices, ignoring the beautiful bright animals around them. THe technology in the hands of the people wraps its tendrils around them, almost seamlessly become one with the individual, forcing a smile over their faces. THe colors of the device attempt to mimic the natural world, distracting the people from the world of trash around them, and the tv man stands eerily over the desolate landscape.
Sheep Creeple
is a reductive screen print of the tv man in monochromatic blues echoing the chilling sentiment of the work
Sheeple Creeple; The Indoctrination of a Nation is title to my graduate thesis exhibition. THis series was the beginning of this larger body of work that will continue throughout my career. Below is the thesis statement the accompanied this work.
Domesticated and docile, Sheep have been a tool of mankind for thousands of years, herding them and controlling them, and now the perfect metaphor for people themselves and how they collect or can be collected. Sheeple Creeple is a commentary, an open observation of contemporary culture, medicated by the media and compelled into submission by money creation. Despondent and dreamlike, Sheeple Creeple is Denatured Alcohol and Ballpoint Pen on Mylar stretching 14 feet of a deep horizon of Sheeple standing atop mounds of garbage. Monolithic media men suited and long-armed, scour over a muted landscape of trash and sheep in a deep blue hue.
Conditioning happens on a multitude of levels in social hierarchy, individuals who collect become influenced by each other and culture begins to form social standards. Structures are in place to establish order, to provide security and turn the cogs of civilization into progress and growth. Humans collect and rely on each other and the foundations of free trade are introduced as the common wealth enters in social contracts. Sheeple Creeple articulates contemporary conditioning practices of media, using their scale to convince people to follow direction blindly without asking important questions, as if they have already asked them. The power of the media is represented by bureaucratically suited television set men who walk, towering high above, dominant over the sheep that stare despairingly. Another monster treads the landscape with the sheep, this money monster endlessly prints money so the sheep can acquire more garbage, and the sheep follow blindly.
Society structured around the television is a disease of modern culture. The television has become the filter to which people understand anything, including democracy and the authority of the structures that legislate, educate and control social order. Central banking, authority over education and mass consumerism are contemporary issues that require new questions, new solutions and can no longer be mediated by media. The structures in place that are built and maintained to protect individual rights have become an avenue for the few in power to build and maintain more power. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s book The Postmodern Condition discusses how the influences on society develop meta-narratives, the psychologies of societies that provide history, morality and ethics in culture. Lyotard defines meta-narratives as essential to postmodern culture because they attempt to legitimize discourses of modern culture. Meta-narratives like religion, science and history give framework to culture but also disguise the simplest truths of life non-existent in modern media, such as individual natural rights, private property and liberty.
“An incredulity toward meta-narratives”, is what Lyotard describes as the phenomenon in postmodern culture, where a new sense of skepticism is placed on the old histories pre-established by an authority that intends to mislead the public to justify ends rather than seeking the true value for an individual, complete freedom.