Async Blueprints – cod
k-art
Description
Created by artist k-art, cods, or “consume, obey, die” reflect the ways in which humans are driven by consumerism in their daily rituals. From one’s waking moment, the individual consumes, obeys, then ultimately dies, according to the artist’s vision for the collection. The artist believes “the consumer has transformed the consumed things into a means of display.” Each cod features a kind of misshapen human headless torso, where the eyes have slipped into the body, such as in cod 197 and 203, or are closed in slumber such as in 198 and 199, or perhaps dead and marked with final Xs, exhibited in 201 and 247. Most of the figures are a frontal view, but in a few rare instances, such as 250 and 195, it is a view of the backside and buttocks. As these figures represent images that have been driven by consumerism, they are almost malformed, malnourished and strange looking with stubby arms and bulging bellies, knobby knees and sporting the symbols where their heads ought to be. Some have holy bowls, others horns, others haloes, some gm/gn.
The religious symbolism continues in the backgrounds that are separated in representations of the deadly sins: wrath, pride, lust, sloth, greed, to show the ways in which these figures experienced their wretched, grotesque conditions. The backgrounds are mostly black, yellow, blue, or magenta and comprised of small hashes and lines, like tallies one might find on the walls of a prison counting his days of incarceration, and each figure is mired down with red cords, umbilical in fashion and tethering them to this hellish backdrop, keeping them chained down to this dark world that nourishes their misery and continuously feeds their wretched state. Nude bodies exposed, these creatures appear as fated to misery as the hapless souls that float forever in Dante’s inferno.