In early 2013, I spent 4 months creating 12 paintings for an upcoming solo show of my work at Subtext Gallery in San Diego, California. I had a desire to have a “homecoming” to the city I was born in, 27 years later. I titled the show “Cognitive Dissonance” and the series of works explored a number of internal struggles I needed to express through my artwork.
My intention with this series was to explore what rises from internal conflict. The ethereal figures are battling opposing forces of natural inclination versus cognitive reasoning. Sometimes there’s resolution, sometimes a truce. And in some pieces, the struggle feels eternal and embedded within.
When I created “Fester,” the largest watercolor painting in this series at 20” x 24,” my intention was to sit with the gravity of my upbringing and how the dynamics of my family shaped my personality as a young adult.
Due to repeated childhood and adolescent abuse, I carried a deeply rooted fear for my entire young life that I was doomed to repeat the cycle of generational trauma. My mother resented my existence, my younger brother mirrored her treatment of me, and my father was unreachable. I made myself small, stayed quiet, and kept my head down in books or drawing, hoping to escape the path of torment. But the bruises, belittling, and neglect still clung to my vessel, like a too tight sweater constricting my natural movement.
In this painting, I utilized personal and intimate symbolism that now, 10 years later, do I finally feel comfortable sharing. As most of my work are self portraits, the figure is a hunched and pained proxy. The roots are underdeveloped in the brittle and acidic soil they’re planted in. The arm band represented my inescapable fate - an inheritance of a “failure to thrive,” like a sickly tree for removal. The crows circling above represented my family, judgmental and cawing their untenable expectations, while the toxic substance in the figure’s hands represented their highly conditional “love.” I found myself becoming the black sheep in my effort to remove myself from these conditions and change my destiny, all the while pining for family that accepted me as I am.
“Fester” was difficult to look at for many years. It was a painful reminder of where I came from and the struggle to heal from my upbringing.
When I discovered this painting was one of the many pieces scraped into the LAION 5B dataset, my heart sank. Such a deeply personal artwork, created in an effort to understand and express my pain, had been violated along with all the others.
Last week, the amended complaint for the Stability lawsuit was filed, which included numerous examples of these programs’ ability to plagiarize existing copyrighted artworks. “Fester” was among them.
Seeing these grotesque knockoffs, with no understanding of the symbolism or intention of my work, perfectly displays the soulless nature of generative AI. An intriguing concept flattened into shapes and swirls, becoming simply a thoughtless remixing of elements I so carefully chose for personal meaning. Visceral pain and longing, analyzed for an algorithm, and spit back out for a cheap gimmick removed of any humanity and used to replace my authentic voice.
“Fester” is not the only painting I’ve made exploring this struggle, but it’s probably the most significant representation of the pain I endured navigating this personal fear. Repeated themes of family, identity, roots, tangled complexities, and toxicity arrive in many other pieces, some of which were also scraped and stretched across countless AI generated images using my name.
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