03/30/2026
“For Oil and Soil”
Displaced bricks and dismembered limbs beneath a demolished building. The stock market rises and falls.
Indistinguishable from rubble. Labeled detritus. Labeled dead. Never alive to be killed. Personhood is for those yet to be. And for those sleeping safe across an ocean.
We subjugate hell to carry us to and fro, soaring on its toxic plumes. It escapes its cage in fiery fury. Displacing the sun, it reaches out. Past the borders, past the ocean. Stinging my eyes as it suffocates those I cannot know.
From the nations of the dead they pick their prizes. A Roman triumph without applause. Redraw the lines till all is claimed. Finally, they can clear the debris.
Once draped in lies told with conviction, now naked in their grotesque truth. For oil and soil. For oil and soil.
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Some technical notes about this work. A lot of new techniques went into this piece. Chiefly being the use of forced perspective. The sculpture gets dramatically larger in proportion as you get closer to the camera. The monster is only about 4 feet tall. To sell the perspective illusion, all the tendril details use smaller balloons as they get closer to the monster’s head, first inflated 160s, then puff inflated 360s →260s →160s. The fine debris on the ground, made from cut up leftover scraps from the main build, is laid out in a similar 360 →160 gradient.
The technique for the buildings are all variations of a brick weave style pattern I saw Joe Tombarello use for an Alligator while at Twist and Shout 2026.
I used a whole bunch of different balloon brands for different reasons. Qualatex gray is very soft and mild, lending itself well to the muted organic distortion of the bodies. The color and finish of black sempertex and kalisan are almost indistinguishable, but they have a not insignificant size difference. Kalisan 160s might as well have their own separate size designation. Using Sempertex in the front hand and Kalisan in the tendrils and back hand gave me a bit more to work with in forcing the perspective. The two front buildings were Kalisan Retro White Sand and Hazelnut. GOATed colors in my book. The back building was Pastel Dusk Rose Britetex. A very nicely subdued color, if a bit too plasticy in feel. Sempertex Neon Orange and Metallic Silver gave a mix of translucency and heavy diffusion to let the flash hidden inside the monster head to really travel. Sempertex Midnight Silk scattered the uplighting in the best way I could’ve hoped for.
While not rising to the same level of surrealness, I drew from Zdzisław Beksiński’s use of mood and texture, paired with the real life imagery coming out of Venezuela, Iran, and Gaza.
