Description

Original handmade surreal collage

Drugs in the City explores the relationship between urban life, substance use and the struggle to survive within the overwhelming rhythms of a modern metropolis.

Constructed as a three-dimensional cityscape from an opened box, the artwork transforms its surface into an urban environment. A horizontal floor covered with images of nature supports a vertical skyline of buildings darkened with black wax crayons. The contrast between the natural world and the oppressive architecture suggests a city that has grown increasingly distant from the environment beneath it.

Above the buildings, a vast swarm of insects moves across the composition. Representing the city’s inhabitants, these figures evoke the collective scale of substance use within metropolitan life. Behind this movement lies a multitude of individual experiences: pressure, loneliness, exhaustion, personal difficulties and the search for relief.

An enormous beast dominates one side of the city. Its presence carries a double meaning: the metropolis itself, with the demands and difficulties of everyday survival, and the drugs that some people turn to in order to endure those pressures. What initially appears to offer an escape from one beast can gradually become another.

Images of mouths filled with colourful pills, drinking glasses and other references to substances suggest the many forms that drug consumption can take. Along the side of the composition, circular shapes represent successive suns, marking the passage of days as the city continues its relentless cycle.

Drugs in the City does not reduce substance use to a moral judgement or a single explanation. Instead, it examines the complex relationship between urban pressure, human vulnerability and the search for ways to cope.

The city becomes a beast to survive, while what promises to make survival easier may become another beast entirely.

Every image has been individually selected, hand-cut and assembled into an original, one-of-a-kind surreal artwork.

Details
• Original artwork
• Handmade surreal collage
• Hand-cut and assembled images
• One of a kind
• Size:
• Materials: