The Story of ONE

Doom and Gloom!!!  Oh glorious, cruel, heartless, murderous, rapacious, malignant, magical, complex, artistic, fascinating, maddening, relentless, ravenous Civilization.  What a reality we live in!  Despite my abhorrence of all of the atrocities ever committed in Civilization, I appreciate the the arts and culture and the love that does exist only because of it.  It’s so so so so complicated.  Are the beautiful things begotten here by this insatiable monster worth all of the wars, slavery, deforestation, pollution, racism, sexism, animal torture, greed, political nonsense, climate change, and our looming 6th mass extinction?  What used to look to me as fun filled opportunity, now looks more like a hell on Earth and a cancer to the planet.  What is Civilization?  I’ll explain it more below in the description of the artwork.

If I could sum up this art piece in a quick statement: ONE is basically a commentary on the complete insanity of Civilization.  It is action packed, filled with jokes and commentary about the downfalls, corruption and eminent collapse of America in particular and the Earth’s eco systems at large.  It was the culmination of about a decade of my obsession, research and pondering about what’s wrong with the world.  At the time I was heavily influenced by environmentalists and critics of civilization like Thom Hartman, Daniel Quin, and Derrick Jensen (even though he’s transphobic.)  I was also kind of into conspiracy theory by David Icke (even though he’s a nut.) In my mid twenties, I was devouring books on these topics, and I literally thought that in my mind, I was putting together the pieces to a puzzle of everything that was wrong with the world so that I could figure out how to save it.  I had wanted to do an art piece compiling all of this information for a long time, but I didn’t have the guts to actually do it.  I was pretty afraid that big brother would squash me.  I needed a catalyst.
A friend of mine was creating a short film wherein the two main characters are each creating an art piece with opposite perspectives on the world, one is making the collage of doom and gloom which ended up being ONE, and the other paints a whimsical painting of Gaia.  I let the actors work on the pieces in the film.  I had full artistic license to do whatever I wanted.  I thought that I could throw together a collage about doom and gloom in 2 weeks and it would be a breeze, but little did I know what was about to come forth.  It all came together organically.  I had no prior vision of how it would develop.  So many things just happened to fit together perfectly like I was piecing together a puzzle that hadn’t been created yet, but was meant to be.
Whenever I start a project like this, my OCD meticulous mind has to turn it into something grand.  The whole thing took about 6-9 months to complete. Unfortunately, the film was never finished and is not available to be seen anywhere, but maybe that is a good thing because the acting was actually pretty bad.  But we did have one little screening party at my studio called Sexy Apocalypse, where it gave the excuse for lots of pretty gay boys to dress up in shredded clothing and high heels.

The Making of ONE:
I was on a low budged so I grabbed whatever was laying around my studio to use as a canvas.  I had these old masonite boards attached to the wall that I would staple loose canvas to for paintings.  I cut them to the same size of 48″x69″, primed them and screwed them back onto the wall side by side.  The entire piece is around 6’x8′ in size.  My friend brought me bags full of Mother Jones magazines, Times magazines, and Yes magazine to cut up.  I also added to the pile some National Geographics, and a bunch of books from the thrift store about America, war, ancient civilizations, nature, and a bible.  I threw in some planned parenthood brochures for good measure.
At the time, I was a little overly obsessed with conspiracy theory, oligarchy, and fascism, and so when thinking about corruption and collapse of civilization, the first image that popped into my head was the pyramid with the “all seeing eye.”  I needn’t look far to find this, I just pulled out a one dollar bill as a reference and sketched it off of that.  I sketched in the pyramid with green paint and it just made sense to continue the drawing of the dollar through the piece, but kind of jumbled up for compositional purposes.

The pyramid was constructed using real dollar bills.  I felt a little bit rebellious doing it, as it could be seen as a felony for cutting, gluing and defacing real dollars.  Then I found the perfect image for the “all seeing eye,” an eyeball peering through an orange peal with a circle of major world churches as the glowing light rays around it.  I thought this was pretty funny.  This section ended up being the center for bureaucratic hubris.  I laid in the background of the pyramid with some ancient images from civilization and then added the hilarious commentaries on top of that.  The best part is where it says “Urgent Memorandum: How Not To Spot A Terrorist” and Julias Cesar, Henry Ford and Alexander the Great are all blatantly pointing  to the caricature of George W. popping out of the Whitehouse and gesturing the innocent “who me?” pose.  Also in this section is Osama and Saddam in love, Dick Cheney in a jailbird suit, Lady Liberty wrapped in ammo holding up a scull, and the devil popping out of the pentagon.  In kidnapper writing I laid in the “Annuit Coeptis” and “Novus Ordo Seclorum” which translates to something meaning that the New World Order is already achieved.  Around the whole section is a circular border of corporate logos including WalMart as a backdrop for the devil.  The next layer of the border are the bad actors in the whole charade: Bush and Cheny again along side Osama, Hitler, The queen of England, and other such lovely individuals.  Then the outer border is patterned after the ornate organic decorative border on the dollar bill that circles the pyramid.  It is made of clippings from the book of Revelations from the bible, the parts describing the destruction of end times, painted green with black outlines.

Obama is clearly the center of attention in the art piece, but I really did not intend for it to be all about him.  There is a much bigger message here than whether or not I support Obama, (which I don’t.  I’m much farther to the radical left.)  Originally it was going to be a soldier kneeling with blood on his hands.  When I created this, the Iraq war was still in full swing.  I loosely sketched in the soldier with paint and started collaging on top of that.  Then I decided that the main character should be a business man.  The average CEO has way more blood on their hands than any soldier.  So I changed the focus of the clippings that make up his clothing to be about consumerism instead of war.  It was really just a last minute decision to put Obama’s face on there when I just so happened to come across his portrait on the cover of TIME magazine that fit the business man’s body perfectly.  This was before the 2008 election.  Then from that point I just went with it giving him lizard skin for a neck, surrounded him with McCain and Bush on each shoulder, and Jimminy Cricket telling him to “Tell the truth.”

For his hands, the perfect image appeared in a pro Obama campaign ad in which black hands were holding a circular plaque saying “President of the United States.”  I placed the two hands where they looked like they belonged and I wasn’t exactly sure what they were doing yet.  Then I used the circular plaque as a halo over his head and gave him stigmata on his hands, as a mocking reference about how everyone thought he was going to be our savior.  It wasn’t until a long time later that a friend pointed out the freemasonry ring on Obama’s right hand, the image that had come from the Obama campaign ad.  That was a very chilling and validating moment, so I put an arrow pointing to it to bring attention to it.  It was pretty bold putting Obama on the collage as the main center of attention even before the election, but it was just meant to be.  To me, in the art piece he is not the problem, he is just symbolizing the leader of the consumeristic and corporate America.  It was also strangely coincidental that his head, which was originally a soldier’s head was placed in the O of the word ONE which is also the first letter of his name Obama.  Eventually it developed what his hands were doing.  In one hand, he’s burning money, dropping it down into a fire with Hitler’s image in it, raised fist, with a clipping that said, “the coming financial pandemic”  Hitler was a reference to the currency collapse in Germany that happened after his reign.  In Obama’s other hand, he’s throwing down a fire alarm, as if to say there is nothing to be alarmed about.  As an environmentalist, I’m not opposed at all to the economic collapse of America.

 

The real star of the piece though, is Gaia off to the right, who lays there dying.  She is beautiful and tragic, wearing a dress made of all of her beautiful animal creations, and flowers in her hair.  She has been stabbed in the heart by a cross wrapped in an American Flag.  This is the best symbolism of the whole piece, embodying conquest and colonialism.  in one hand she is holding a light switch that she is turning off, in the other she is dropping a flower made of an enlarged image of a uranium atom, and it is holding in it’s petals a dead bee.  All of the images surrounding Gaia are images of environmental degradation and animal abuse.

Above Gaia is another circle regarding energy.  In the center is a nuclear plant with Santa Clause popping out of the top as if to say “Merry Christmas” with the words below him, “The world is running out of oil.”   It’s also shooting up a neon green explosion into the sky with the words “If we don’t confront our energy crisis, we’re screwed!”  The explosion shoots up into the top area of the piece which creates a big white cloud of “doom and gloom” phrases that covers the whole top of the piece.
Just below the cloud of doom, you see background images of slavery, racism, and war, some of which are very graphic and hard to look at.  Like the dollar bill, I placed the words “In God We Trust” but I inserted “war” into it so that it reads “In War God We Trust” with the very last ‘t’ being a burning cross.

It is titled “ONE” because it ONE dollar.  I also interpret it as meaning that we are all one, and that all of the many indigenous tribes of wild humans that once existed have been assimilated into our one culture of civilization through years of colonialism and genocide.  There may be a few still existing here and there, but pretty much now the whole world population is civilized, meaning that they live in cities that are unsustainable.  In this section, I address the topic of overpopulation and show masses of people within the letters.  In the background I show some images of fetuses and human anatomy, plus words like “baby boomers,”  “get your sperm moving,” and “sexual violence, was it good for you?”

These next parts are easier to see in person but I will describe them.  Here I will explain a little more about Civilization.  The first horizontal stripe which is part of the bottom border of the dollar bill is a time-line.  On the far left it starts out with the big bang and dinosaurs.  It certainly is not to scale representative of the billions of years that that time period took, I would need a much bigger canvas for that.  Next is the first appearance of humanoids living in the trees and eating fruit.  Then homo sapien sapien arrives and their use of weapons and fire, which allowed them an edge over their natural competitors and allowed them to survive in colder climates.  At some point they started cooking of food, which I think affected their nutritional intake.  They lived in tribes of relatively small numbers of nomadic hunters and gatherers.  They extincted some species like the great woolly mammoth but all in all, they lived in harmony with the Earth and maintained a low overall human population for 200,000 years.

Then the invention of agriculture just around 10,000 years ago changed everything.  Now instead of hunting and gathering, they could stay in one place, and due to the over abundance of food available, populations grew rapidly.  This was the beginning of Civilization.  Civilization is defined as people living in a city, where they have denuded their own land base and must import goods from other places.  At some point, someone got really greedy and locked up the food and made people work for it.  This is the beginning of human slavery.  Civilization would not exist without slavery, because free humans would not voluntarily “slave away” to erect kingdoms for themselves to be ruled over in their spare time.  As populations continued to grow, the land base became destroyed via the process of desertification and they had to spread out to bigger and bigger territory to feed their massive armies.  This was the beginning of colonialism and genocide. When their expansion bumped into neighboring tribes, they made them join their ways, probably as slaves, or die.  Then the conquests reached farther out across oceans until it spread over the whole world.

You see pictured in the time-line Columbus taking over America, killing the Native Americans and importing black slaves from Africa. This is the perfect example of Civilization devastating  indigenous cultures through colonialism with all of it’s cruelty.  Once the conquest and genocide in America was all said and done, further down the line is the technology explosion, the discovery of fossil fuels led to the invention of trains, planes, automobiles, TVs, tanks and more sophisticated warfare, all the way up to robots and microchips.  At the very end of the time-line is a rocket ship taking off with the caption “When we left Earth” and a broken watch depicting the end of time.

With ever greater technology, Civilization keeps on growing and destroying everything at faster and faster rates and will not stop until everything living thing is poisoned, exploited, dead, and turned into trash heaps.  It is a sickness.  It is based on the watiko, the greed.  It is insanity.
Below the time-line in the next stripe are activist messages about being kind to animals, and standing up to the madness, and about sexual violence, plus a lot of other stuff.  The very bottom stripe border of the dollar bill is filled with trash, actual trash and some pictures of trash and quite appropriately, the leader of the consumer culture, Obama, is kneeling in it.

There are tons of other little goodies and funny jokes to be seen throughout the piece.  Seeing the original framed, hung and all lit up in person is quite the experience.  It’s a bit overwhelming at first, but then you hone in on an area and find something interesting.  I always told people that it takes about two weeks to see it all.  Then you step back and all of the minute details blur together and you only see the larger image of Obama and Gaia playing out a life and death drama in front of the God of this nation, the dollar bill.
This piece was featured in a few local Salt Lake City art shows, but then mostly remained hanging in my studio with not a lot of viewership.  Then the Occupy movement came and ONE got a second wind and life size banner prints were featured in 12 gallery shows internationally and several protests around the USA.  Some of those banners are still out there in the world.  Watch this video interview to hear all about that.

The original is available for sale.  The price is $999,000.  I would love for it to land in a museum somewhere but now that there are life-sized prints available and the image won’t ever be hidden away, the highest bidder in the auction houses could take it. A big portion of the profits I will donate to an environmental charity.

There are now limited edition, life-size, fine art giclee prints on canvas available for $9,990.  It’s the highest quality print, UV coated, 200 year rated inks, stretched on gallery wrap canvas frames in two pieces with black edges.  The actual size of it is around 6’x8′ and the quality is superb.  Please email SandyParsonsArt@gmail.com if you are interested.

Now you know the story of ONE!