Death and Ponies: Experimenting with an NFT Series on OpenSea
After much thought and research, I've decided to try my hand at an NFT collection, using the results of part of my painting planning process. I realize many have mixed or not-so-mixed feelings about NFTs and crypto in general, but please trust that I've been learning a lot about these spaces through my day job and my own efforts and that I am experimenting with a purpose.
I chose to mint this series of images I took for a specific reason: they are crappy, fast, and cheaply assembled, put together in a mad dash and naive way to document a thought, which is how I feel about a lot of NFT art. It felt fitting.
I'm more excited about blockchain technology and metaverse spaces for other types of artists than for myself. I'm also interested in how this may influence artificial intelligence progress and how art is made and shared, especially 'installation art.' There is a lot to be rightfully wary of and excited about.
If you want to discuss it, contact me. My grasp is limited, but I'm always open to conversation and education.
See the NFT Collection: Death and Ponies: Dedicated to Girlhood Grief
Death and Ponies #1
“Death and Ponies is a vanitas, a genre of art that uses symbols of death and change to remind us of their inevitability. It is a photography series by Philadelphia-based artist Elizabeth Virginia Levesque.
Elizabeth, a lover of kitsch and childhood superstitions, combines decaying toys from her own childhood and universal symbols like skulls with cheap craft materials.
This photography series started as a tool to plan future oil paintings but soon became their own body of work, as she realized the photos themselves had an intrinsic charm and dark humor that didn’t need to be interpreted through paint to exist as high art. Elizabeth decided to offer them as NFTs, feeling they belonged to this new medium rather than as printed and framed pieces due to their glitchy and contemporary color schemes and topic, ephemerality, which opposes blockchain tech. The saying goes that the internet is forever, and maybe blockchains are making that more accurate than ever.”