Pitch Black XIII - II
Commissioned flier for Pitch Black at Bar XIII.
Pitch Black XIII - I
Commissioned flier by Bar XIII Delaware.
Sudwestafrika
Honestly the most risky piece I’ve done.
The play is about a group of students making a play about the Namibian genocide, committed by the Germans around World War One. It touches on modern racial issues, and manages to dance between the lines of comedy and tragedy. Needless to say, making something that could sell all of that was a challenge.
I thought it’d be cool to push the envelope as much as I could, while still trying to maintain sensitivity. I decided I wanted to play on the traditional comedy and tragedy masks, but have the tragedy resemble a traditional mask as much as possible. The comedy mask took a lot of work to perfect, borrowing styles from Jim Crow-era blackface images, a WWI German spike helmet, Otto Dix, and early German expressionist cinema. A rope ties the two together, foreshadowing some growing horrors as the play progresses.