E S S A Y - V I C E

Both of my paintings for the Antler Gallery, Poison Garden show were about addiction, (selected) botanicals from which many of our common addictive substances are derived, and the notion that today’s opioid crisis is the modern day equivalent to The Opium Wars of the 19th Century. This painting, Vice, contains imagery representing many of the substances I personally have struggled with in my own life, and also other substances in our culture that people typically have trouble with.

The botanicals include coca for cocaine, poppies and poppy pods for opiates, wheat for whiskey and a grapevine for wine, the tobacco plant, and cannabis. Also represented are coffee and tea plants for caffeine, a single raspberry for sugar, chili pepper flowers for spice, and a tongue-in-cheek reference to a lily for my cat— because while they are beautiful flowers, lilies are among the botanicals toxic to felines. 

I included the amanita muscaria mushrooms, which according to Terence McKenna will “deceive you”, and I placed psilocybin mushrooms in the eyes of the skull because these mushrooms give one insight and vision, and can actually offer aid in overcoming addiction.

Many of these substances can be used in positive ways— but with all things it has to do with the intention of the user and moderation in use. The skull is an obvious representation of death, but with death in the plant world also comes rebirth, reincarnation, reseeding, and provides energy for life forms like fungi that transform dying matter into a fertile substance.

Finally, I placed a moth where the brain is (generically viewed as where the mind resides) to represent metamorphosis— in the case of the forming of a true addiction, not all metamorphoses are a positive transformation. More specifically, I chose the luna moth to represent this change, because of the moon’s relationship to the shadow self, as I feel so many habits form in the privacy of night and behind closed doors.