just read the interview. gonna post his explanation of it in here cause it's pretty cool and interesting
What was the overriding theme of the piece?
The full title of the piece is Out of the Jungle It Came: The Irrational Fears & Paranoid Delusions of a Sleep Deprived Stoner. The print is one of several pieces that make up the entire project. The ends of the print connect, creating a loop that represents my sleepless nights and irrational fears that are nipping at my heels. The figure to the far right is a dream representation of myself–smoking a novelty-sized spliff, dreadlocks flowing behind me, and not a care in the world, skateboarding over a sea of freshness and sorrow (sorrow referring to my former addiction to shoes made in Nike sweatshops). Behind me is the Barge of Nightmares, the physical manifestation of my irrational fears and paranoid delusions. Filled with pirates, samurai, vikings, mongols, conquistadors, gangbangers, suits, witches, police, knights, jihadists, and demons, this dreadnaught of human atrocity represents the evils of man and strange fears I have pinned to them. The second underlying theme is my ode to the history of printmaking. I incorporated various themes that the greatest printmakers used and regurgitated them into my own contemporary print. My use of skulls and love for them stem from their representation of the mortality of man and is a theme that has been revisited hundreds of thousands of times throughout printmaking. Witches have roots deep in print. They almost always have sagging droopy breasts and the bones of infants dancing along with them. The reason they have three breasts is a pop culture reference to the Arnold movie Total Recall, which I saw when I might have been a little too young. Toward the back end of the ship you find a crew of suits and the mouth of Hell. The suits are taking the “Blockheads,” who represent people abused by the systems of man, and are hooking them and throwing them overboard. As their flesh sloughs from their bones, they are hoisted up into the back end of the mouth of Hell. Within the ship they are given malice, hate, terror, and a weapon and spill back into the world as a minion of darkness. The force that propels this floating terror is the evil breathe of David Lo Pan, the main antagonist from one of my all time favorite movies, Big Trouble in Little China. The movie was always on Sunday afternoons on TV and has come to be a big influence on my art.
