While recording my album RELEASE DELUXE, I began to experiment with creating a visual language that corresponded to the spell searching within my music. The result accumulated into a symbology; an esoteric constellation of intersecting words and hands. The simple two-tone aesthetic combined with the dynamic op-art vernacular makes the sigil drawings easily reproducible in print and digital formats while maintaining their complex visuality. These works reference the poster culture of the 1960’s, zines, psychedelia, and band iconography.
There is a spiritual and political dimensionality to these works. A sigil is a symbol used in magic. The term usually refers to a type of pictorial signature of a demon or other entity. In modern magic a sigil refers to a symbolic representation of a practitioner’s desired outcome. Sigil comes from sigillum, Latin for seal. It may also be related to the Hebrew word segula, meaning word action, item of spiritual effect, or talisman. A sigil is used to conjure a thing or desire into being.
The repeating hand icon is a metonym for the body; distilled into the gesticulation of a spell being cast. Like the Hand of Fatima, Psychic Cross, or sacred geometry, these sigils become the symbols of larger mythologies of beliefs, desires, behaviors and practices. As magic has been persecuted throughout the centuries, art has become one of the remaining public repositories for esoteric exploration.
The hand drawn text is featured throughout my work; on the cover of the RELEASE DELUXE vinyl, t-shirts designs, my Conquest of the Universe orWhen Queens Collide movie poster, and other original works on paper and panel.
sigil (flag)
2018
36 x 60 in
digital print on satin, grommets, metal rings
on display with Harborview and Pole at Material Art Fair 2018
