​Trapped Inside is another in the series of Inside/Outside Images that I have made over the last year. It pits an outside image of rushing water against an inside image of a bottle of hand sanitizer. The water has been copied and pasted in a way similar to the Rubber Glove Angles…but this time it is repeated more often and does not form a mandala. Furthermore, I then searched for ways to edit the background in order to pull parts of it into the foreground merging it with the bottle of hand sanitizer.
 
The hand sanitizer takes the form of one of my household inventions. The blue rocks at the bottom, and the red areas at the half way point, are colorized and emphasized so that they might appear as arms and feet on a strange little hand sanitizer creature. In addition, the top is blown up into a sphere so that it may appear as a head. The pump itself has had a recessed flat plane turned into a screen, or window, where a face peers out.
 
The face and hands, smashed up against the window of this sanitizer robot, harken back to an image I created years ago called, “Strange Things are Afoot in my Rumpus Room.” In that image, a person in a cartoon Bryan Mulroney mask is trapped in a television set.
 
So, all told, this image brings a number of divergent themes together into one artwork. Its playful because of the little robot, but it also tackles contemporary themes related to anxiety and hygiene.  While these themes are in vogue at the moment, they certainly are not limited in scope exclusively to the current pandemic.

This image is modelled after a typical greeting card with a flower as the subject, but there are a few key differences. First of all, the border is a sliver of rubber glove imagery. Second the flower arrangement points to an empty space located at a strong position within the rule of thirds, where normally there would be some poetry or text of some kind. But the wingdings font has been used, so you can’t easily read it. This helps to make obvious the compositional device being used. That is the main point of the image, which could be summed up as: Made you look. Finally, the same words are arranged around the flower. I did this to make the viewer question whether or not the flower itself has been somehow “photoshopped” in there. As such, it might deny the reality that this image is pretty much a straight-forward photograph with text and a border. A Typical greeting card…?