Birth, Aging, Sickness, Death
Year of Creation:
2025
Media:
Mixed Media Collage on Paper (Cardboard, Magazine Clippings, Oil Pastels)
Dimensions:
18 × 24 inches each (Quadriptych)
Interaction Type:
Not Interactive
Duration:
None
Description:
A quadriptych of collages confronts the Buddhist cycle of dukkha—birth, aging, sickness, and death—through the lens of desire and its distortions. The work draws specifically from the artist’s own sexual desire, pathologized through early and prolonged exposure to internet pornography. Sickness, one of the four panels, bursts with layered sexual imagery, clippings, and text from decades of Playboy magazines. The overwhelming density of images creates a sensation of overstimulation, echoing the artist’s lived experience of addiction. At the top of the composition, the words Sick World declare both personal and cultural indictment: the artist may feel sick, but the world made him sick. Across the series, the collages chronicle shifting cultural messages about sexuality, masculinity, and femininity, using excess and fragmentation to critique how desire becomes both commodified and a site of suffering.
Core Question:
Is desire itself the root of suffering, or a symptom of the world that shapes it?
Loop Analysis
Structure:
Cultural Feedback Loop
Definition:
A system where media images of sexuality shape personal desire, which in turn fuels the production and circulation of further imagery.
Leverage Point:
Recognition that overstimulation is not personal failure but a structural condition reproduced by culture.
Inputs / Outputs:
Playboy archive images + text → layered collage composition → overstimulated viewer response → reflection on cultural messaging → reframed perception of desire
Effect:
Overwhelm, discomfort, recognition of cultural complicity in personal pathology
Ethical Valence:
Critical and vulnerable—exposes personal wounds while implicating systemic forces that produce them
Design Note:
The choice to use the artist’s own history and body of desire transforms cultural critique into confession, collapsing public and private registers.
