INSTANTCURE

Grime and glory, scum of the universe, we’re all in it together. Seemingly chaotic one moment, orderly the next, and racing knowingly towards nothing, with so many horrible people and so many amazing people, the contradictions can feel maddening. You can ignore it, you can try to explain it, or you can accept it and even celebrate it. It feels shitty to be alive and it feels great to be alive, and there’s potential for scum or glory for all of us in a way.

New York City in the 1970’s was a time of particularly grimy lows and glorious highs. It was a fascinating place where affluent partiers crowded into discos a few blocks from near-apocalyptic squalor. On any given day you were just as likely to fall into a downtown bar filled with trend-setting artists as you were to get robbed, beaten and left for dead. Despite this, the city functioned, persisted, and eventually emerged stronger, while those who lived there stood the test of those times and made a life of it. This is the world I was conceived in, born into and raised in the shadow of, and it’s also where I live now. This series is, if nothing else, a love-letter to New York City, as it was then, as it is now and as it will be till the end. The images in this series immerse the viewer in an alternate-reality version of 70’s NYC where landmarks, celebrities and average people are juxtaposed with god-like, pop culture icons wielding reality-bending powers. These fantastical “heroes” and “villains” with their fights, team-ups, betrayals, and reunions are meant to symbolize the internal and external struggles of daily existence, as well as the unseen forces that underpin it all. As an alienated, creative kid, I grew up relating to these comic-book characters as part of a counter-cultural language, reflecting the hopes, fears and dreams of the writers and artists that spoke through them. Many of these characters also lived in a fictionalized version of 1970s NYC at the time and were created by people living in the real thing, further personifying what it felt like to be alive both then and now: open, unsure, striving, overwhelmed and occasionally triumphant.

I worked predominantly with traditional drawing tools and methods, embracing how the paper often degraded as I added layers of detail, which amplified the themes of decay and renewal, and imparted a warped, worn-out quality that accentuates the messy, weird world of New York City in the 70s, in all its decrepit, resilient, grimy glory.