Titles: Strayed #2 and Strayed #5 Year: 2016 Limited edition print selling price: Available on request Strayed (artist statement) Our lives are governed by a monetary system that is ultimately unsustainable and destructive, both to ourselves and the environment. The storefront mannequin, a populist icon of artifice in our time, becomes a concrete symbol here: the very embodiment of soulless consumerism, promoting unattainable ideals to a global materialistic culture on every conceivable level. The mannequin is transformed into a ghostly metaphor for our capitalist society’s alienation from the sacred beauty and flow of the natural world, and therefore, from itself. Vapidly mocking female flesh, it is almost as if she stands between us and the primary abundance of Mother Earth. Our eye is drawn to this figure in the frame, an echo sounding from deep within our subconscious. She seems to have strayed from some haunted dream, ever encased in robotic sleep. There’s something human there, but at the same time there is not. The uneasy truth is, we’re looking in part at what we have become. Both fragile and divine, elegant and monstrous. Home, but utterly lost. Artist: Jac Kritzinger