Title: Pinch
Year: 2022
Size: 8000x8000px (digital)
Technique: Many layers of digitally-rendered and AI-enhanced hands, flowers, circuits, faces, and landscapes; manipulated, processed and filtered in Picsart and Glitch Studio.

Created for #glitchtober2022, a daily creative-prompt challenge organized by Glitch Artists Collective during October 2022. This piece examines the dissonance between capitalist possession-obsessed consumer culture and natural beauty, represented by the ironic destruction of that beauty as a necessary consequence of possessing it. Flowers represent the exquisite fragility of the world we’re destroying; we traditionally try to keep cut flowers alive artificially, just as we take temporary measures to sustain only what we capriciously value. Our love of beauty is itself innocent, though - each hand alone intends no cruelty, its aesthetic goal remaining realized and pure. However, it’s the collective effect that pushes toward destruction. We pluck, pinch, cut, pull, rip, until nothing remains. All we’re collectively able to focus on is the cacophony of taking, so this fills most of the frame; a barren future lies closely behind, no longer hidden.