paintings of a speculative future which is not dystopian, made with @openaidalle and watercolor and oil pastel references, specifically:

🟥🟩⬛️⬜️ imagined picnics in gaza where i have not been and palestine where i have eaten on the ground after helping local palestinian farmers harvest their olive crops and after being shot at by the idf though what i witnessed and experienced was a blip in the larger context of locals and lifetime activists who were resisting the continued occupation 🖤

and i guess whether painted by human or machine, coming together to eat is a ritual that no culture can deny has brought together human beings in relative peace ever since we could complain there was not enough salt (circa prehistoric times ? ) and yet devour everything in front of us anyway out of a base and simple instinct we all possess: hunger.

back in 2014, when i visited i made analog photos which were not documentation of violence but rather of an experience i had the privilege to make. when i left i was sobbing to frank oceans lost and a bigger cliche could not exist and yet i also felt like this is not my story to tell and i never published any of the digital photos bc they looked like the existing endless getty image reel and i had no desire to contribute to that so i processed by almost amateur hour status 35mm film at rossmann and published the story 48/palestine with @jaffatelaqlam

i'll add that as an artist trained in frankfurt thot, symbolic realness is an influence i can't deny. so hence the title. hence my perennial attempts at imbuing my real feelings into my work albeit in a cryptic way bc as we know, the world can be cruel and certainly a chunk of society seems to enjoy punching down out of what one assumes are their own insecurities bc it is nonsensical behavior when one considers how poor tastes are even when resources are available and lack is often a state of mind in the same geographies which seem to profit the most from suffering (not that hegemonix anonymous are limited in their reach; it's a global phenomenon)

anyway, here i wanted to imagine simple and yet cheerful picnics to invite the possibility of peace sooner rather than later 💚❤️🖤🤍