"Satirical Inferno" – NOT MINTED
Satirical Inferno was inspired by a night that unraveled like a slow-motion car crash - gorgeous in its chaos, merciless in its truth. I was a restless 25-year-old, sitting in a strip club that smelled like spilled bourbon and old decisions. The cheap bar’s red neon signs shimmered across glittered skin - women with aching smiles. I saw them as children playing dress-up in a burning pretend playhouse. It wasn’t hell, exactly - hell would’ve had better lighting. My friends were hooting, howling. Their laughter felt grotesque, like children throwing matches in a house already burning.
I looked down at my hands - sticky with spilled bourbon, years of apathy trapped in skin and bone. The weight of choices not made, of silences that had grown teeth. And in that moment, something in me - quietly, defiantly - said: no more. That night became the spark for Satirical Inferno.
The woman at its center, crafted from torn paper-mâché, casts judgment on the cartoon town behind her - a projection of the anger I felt toward my friends that night. The washed-out white backdrop is stained with red neon light, echoing the glow of the strip club and the uneasy contrast between innocence lost and the possibility of rebirth.
Above it all, the flickering neon “REHAB” sign - a darkly comedic name for the strip joint - looms over a surreal scene where childhood icons - Mickey, Minnie, Donald - are rendered in stark white, drained of their familiar colors. The once-pure white, symbolic of childhood innocence, now exposes its erosion. They mirror the chaos I witnessed: a parody of salvation where the party never ends, but the escape grows hollow.
Satirical Inferno is an exorcism of everything we hide behind humor, habit, and distraction. It confronts a culture that laughs through the fire, numbs itself in the glow of neon, and calls it healing. I wanted to show what happens when innocence is commodified, when escape becomes performance. This piece isn’t about regret - it’s about awakening. About setting fire to the lie and daring to walk through the smoke
Neon Diaries is a visual metaphor - every artwork I create is born from a personal story, much like ink spilled in a private journal. But unlike hidden pages, my art lays bare my deepest thoughts for all to see. In Neon Diaries, she is surrounded by floating electric monitors. Each glowing screen reveals a distinct futuristic journal entry - a metaphor for the way all my artwork tells stories. And this piece, in particular, explains how I came to that style of creating.