In August, I connected with Rachel Haywire, who is an artist, musician, writer, and advocate for transhumanism. She could relate to my story about why I left New York City, because she had done the same thing for the same reasons.
We originally met in an online seminar about AI art generation and how to combine that with both digital art and traditional art methods.
She liked my work so much that she called me up and asked how soon I could get to the city to start collaborating with her, and I told her the soonest I could be there was Thanksgiving. I booked the flight that night.
I went for a bold, high-contrast look with this since it’s designed to be displayed on Instagram and must be clear at a small size. The Helvetica font is ubiquitous in the city because it makes information like subway signs stand out among all the chaos.
There’s a series of “dots” in the exhibit that riff on the “six feet apart” signs that were all over the city a few years ago. Each one uses elements of irony, dark humor, and very simple graphics to comment on intense experiences that turned lives upside down but were not acceptable to talk about openly until very recently.
The concept of a part of the soul leaving the body dates back to Shamanic belief systems, which were universal worldwide thousands of years ago. In ancient times, people believed that when an event was too painful for someone to survive, a piece of their soul would leave in order for them to survive. Modern psychology describes this phenomenon with phrases like “trauma causes people to dissociate at the moment.”
There’s certainly an element of shock value to the entire exhibit, but it’s shock value intended to lead to “soul retrieval” or “processing.”
So far, after posting this on social media, I’ve gotten responses from people in NYC with all different backgrounds and beliefs saying they agree with the sentiment of “we never went back to normal,” and they can’t wait to see this! I honestly couldn’t picture that kind of positive feedback on a widespread level when I first had the idea for this show in January 2022.