As Above, So Below, 2021

Digital collage, animation

This collage was created by scanning hundreds of images from magazines and arranging them in Photoshop. Each individual section was then animated in After Effects. The piece is compositionally based on a 13th-century icon of St. Francis titled St. Francis and Scenes from His Life. The collage borrows from the icon’s vertical storytelling and inverts the symbols and values associated with St. Francis (poverty, love of nature, peace) in order to depict modern capitalism as a mythical beast. Conceptually, the piece is influenced by Eugene McCarraher’s book The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.