Pixelated Divebomber

This collage was made from 3 different images at a time when I felt that my mental health was literally in a nose dive.

Creating art that reflects how I’m feeling at the time helps me to better understand those feelings, as well as providing an outlet for certain toxic emotions. 

This piece therefore serves as a medium for me to interpret my own emotions at a specific point in time and to reflect on them, as well as providing a cathartic experience to let these emotions flow out and for me to make peace with them. 

The saintly figure on the left of the image is from the top of the Hotel Dieu building on the corner of De Pins and St. Urbain. I wanted to use this figure to show that even in these times of deep emotional turmoil, there’s always something, or someone, on your shoulder that will try to help you out of it. That something or someone to me is my friend group here in Montreal, some of whom live very close to the corner on St. Urbain where I took the original photo of the statue.

The figure in the white shirt smoking a joint is myself, standing on the balcony of my apartment, which you can see in the background in a greenish tint, and which also includes a no smoking sign. I wanted to include these things because I believe I use cannabis as a tool that can either help my mental health, or hinder it based on the frequency of use. In this case, I am facing away from the sign and ignoring it, which complements my real world actions of sometimes not listening to my own warnings and smoking too frequently, which in turn makes my mental health worse.

Wearing the white shirt with a woman’s face and a rose on it also has meaning, as most the times where my mental health has taken a nosedive was because of issues surrounding love and relationships. 

The 3rd image superimposed on the top of the others is of an American fighter plane crash landing on the deck of the USS Lexington in 1945 in the Western Pacific. The image is inverted downwards to portray the sense that it is hurtling towards destruction at great speeds, or dive bombing.

The maze-like pixilation expresses how confusing these feelings can be, not only to myself, but to everyone who experiences them.