Big Slick

My artworks are a collection of loving renders of niche icons through graphite and charcoal portraiture. Using traditional drawing, an analog medium, to archive the visual aesthetics of the internet's underbelly preserves their digital ephemera in a physical context. In my recent series, Community Cards, a balance is struck between capturing internet culture's immediacy and traditional drawing's meditative process. 

Big Slick — an ace and king in poker — references the cultural significance of tattooing as a means of immortalizing imagery on skin, while also alluding to the high-stakes, fast-paced world of online poker communities, where anonymous players forge identities through gameplay. Through drawing, this emphasis is placed on the physical labor and materiality involved in archiving digital sensibilities. An intention to elevate elements often dismissed as ‘low-brow art’ — such as text formats, pixel art, or online graphics — by situating them within a fine art context.

My work encourages viewers to experience the nostalgia and introspection of recognizing familiar aspects of digital culture while simultaneously viewing them in a new light — elevated, embalmed, and imbued with a sense of permanence.