Wreckage of The Pequod
"Wreckage of The Pequod" is a meditation on the relentless cycles of desire, consumption, and decay. This piece draws its narrative from Melville's Moby-Dick, transposing the Pequod’s doomed voyage onto the seas of modern consumer culture. At its heart, the work is a gold-painted Keurig K-Cup coffee machine—both a functional relic of convenience and an emblem of the detritus left behind by the industrial corporate complex. This machine, laden with useless technological appendages, stands as an ironic altar to the "hot black coffee" that has fueled empires, revolutions, and economies, while leaving behind a wake of environmental wreckage.
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The gold paint transforms discarded materials into symbols of false treasure, evoking the allure of gold as both a beacon of human ambition and a curse. The used Starbucks logo, composed of spent coffee grounds, embodies the work’s central paradox: a society built on fleeting pleasures and disposable treasures. Like the Pequod’s crew pursuing an unattainable white whale, we chase ephemeral dreams of fortune and fame, leaving behind mounds of discarded packaging, shattered ideals, and environmental scars.
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The composition’s symbolic geometry—a square with a circle and a bisecting line—anchors the work in both cosmic and terrestrial meaning. The square speaks to the earthly realm, to the rigid structures of industry and commerce. The circle, infinite and eternal, echoes the ouroboros of human consumption, where garbage becomes relic, and relic becomes treasure. The vertical line cuts through both, a mast or axis mundi that connects the spiritual and the profane, rising like Ahab’s harpoon against the heavens.
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The pedestal beneath the machine—a golden inverted L held aloft by a two-tailed female figure—references the Melusine, an alchemical symbol of transformation and duality. Her dual tails, entwined in gold and girded with metal debris, speak to the tension between sinking into the wreckage of our past and rising toward a cleaner, more intentional future. The seashells and sand scattered across the piece evoke the shoreline where civilizations meet their limits, and where the remnants of fallen empires are swallowed by the ocean’s depths.
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This piece interrogates the global history of the coffee trade, from its origins in Sufi rituals to its central role in colonial expansion across oceans. The "golden treasures" submerged within the work are built from the refuse of Atlanta’s streets, mirroring the plunder of past empires that left scars on the world’s ecosystems and cultures. The pristine cups and sleeves at the periphery stand as offerings of a sanitized present, masking the dirty labor and ecological harm beneath the surface.
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The performance aspect of "Wreckage of The Pequod" transforms the gallery into a ritual space. The audience is invited to choose between a golden key—symbolic of the elusive fortune we chase—or exchanging it for simple a cup of coffee, a momentary pleasure that requires their participation in this cycle of consumption. By offering coffee as communion, the work reframes the act of consumption as a spiritual ritual, echoing the Eucharist while reflecting the commodification of spirituality itself.
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Ultimately, "Wreckage of The Pequod" explores themes of revenge and ruin, echoing Ahab’s relentless pursuit of the whale. It is a critique of the industrial corporate complex, which, like the Pequod, sails ever onward toward inevitable collapse. It is a reflection on the fall of empires into the sea, on the detritus left in their wake, and on the occult forces of desire and loss that drive us to chase treasures—be they gold, coffee, or the fleeting dream of immortality.
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Wreckage of The Pequod
Keurig machine, wood, metal, plastic, coffee grinds, shells, sands, street detritus, etched acrylic,
paper cups and paper sleeves with acrylic and enamel on custom box frame.
36" x 36" x 14" in / 91.4 x 91.4 x 35.6 cm
2021
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Garbbish: A Group Exhibition — ABA Gallery - Atlanta, GA - 2021









