ADDICTION

Acrylic and mixed media on wood panel.

30x30x1"

What are we becoming?

Not just individually, but collectively — as people are increasingly pulled into digital systems designed to capture our attention, predict our behavior, and monetize our emotions.

This painting was inspired in part by The Death of Marat, the iconic French Revolution painting of the murdered revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat. In his painting, the artist Jacques-Louis David depicts Marat clutching a pen — a symbol of politics, ideology, and communication. In my version, the pen becomes a glowing cellphone. The martyr of "revolution" is replaced by the modern citizen, sedated not by violence, but digital dopamine.

The figure reclines in a vulnerable state, tubes connected to his head and flowing outward into an abstract face that appears to dissolve and fragment. To me, the tubes represent data extraction. Not blood, but identity and possibly humanity.

Let’s face it. The digital economy runs on our focus.

We scroll, shop and socialize on our devices. And all the while, corporations are collecting extraordinary amounts of information — our habits, fears, desires, purchases, beliefs, relationships, sexual orientation and political leanings.

Attached to the painting are pieces of my old laptop. I wanted the physical presence of technology embedded directly into the work itself, almost like relics or evidence from a civilization in transition and another reminder of how interconnected we’ve become to the digital world. The Amazon box symbolizes the seduction of commerce — the convenience sold to us as progress. One click. One delivery. Faster. Easier. Smarter.

But convenience always has a cost.

The cellphone in the painting glows with a thumbprint icon. A reminder of surveillance tied to bio-metric identity. Our fingerprints unlock our devices, but increasingly they also unlock access to our behaviors, preferences, movements, and private lives.

The painting is not anti-technology. I use technology every day. Like most people, I benefit from it constantly and I'm somewhat addicted. AI innovation, digital communication, and online tools have enormous potential to improve human life. But I think we are moving so quickly into this new era that we rarely stop to ask deeper questions about what it is doing to us psychologically, socially, and politically.

What happens when entire economies depend on human addiction?

What happens when loneliness becomes profitable?

What happens when algorithms learn us better than we know ourselves as the mega tech rich billionaires get richer and richer and RICHER!

And perhaps most unsettling of all: Who ELSE is watching?

That question no longer belongs solely to dystopian fiction in movies. Surveillance is becoming increasingly normalized through both corporate systems and government policy debates. Data collection is no longer just about selling us products; it is also about influence, prediction, control, and power. Around the world — and especially in the United States — conversations about digital surveillance, AI regulation, and data governance are accelerating in real time.

Meanwhile, many of us continue feeding these systems voluntarily, often unconsciously, because participation has become inseparable from modern life itself.

That is why I used The Death of Marat as a metaphor. Not for literal death, but for a slower erosion — the fragmentation of identity, privacy, stillness, and human connection beneath systems designed to keep us engaged AT ALL COSTS.