Many Moons she spent

Warm and all--

Alone

Watching her friends

Watch the shadows.

Many days she wasted

Blowing smoke in faces

But still

They watched

The shadows.

Undeterred but impatient

She counted down the days till'

She set fire to the cave and--

Watched it

Burn.

-RJ

Lamb to the slaughter

Conradyn Cunaeus (Dutch, 1828–1895), "Allegorical Depiction of Loyalty and Love" (detail)

Evening Mood by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1882)

Night and Her Daughter Sleep, Mary L. Macomber, 1902

Like, I'm not gonna say that the X-Men and their various imitators are anything like a perfect allegory, but "it's a bad allegory because super powers really are dangerous" has never held water for me. Like, are we really just gonna uncritically accept the implicit assumption lurking in that argument that bigotry is only wrong to the extent that its targets lack the ability to threaten the status quo? Hand-wringing over whether certain minorities are inherently dangerous is – and, critically, always has been – a smoke-screen for the real conversation about who has the right to possess the capacity for violence, and you can't engage with that conversation if your opening move is to concede that the only legitimate victim is a powerless one.

L’aurore William Bouguereau

Something that stood out to me a lot from this album is the intentional de-personalization of extremely personal feelings and stories. She seems to have decided for this project that in order to be free to be completely honest in her art (which tbf she always has been but never as much as this album), she needs to visualize herself, and thus her stories, as a third party, an external entity on which she's conducting a post-mortem examination. Her 2016 self and the hate train she suffered after Snakegate is reimagined as Cassandra, a character from Greek mythology who had visions in her dreams but no one believed her and instead she was punished. Her anxiety of holding her lover's career back is instead described as The Albatross, this girl who everyone has been warned to stay away from bc she causes problems and is a liability. Her sweet, innocent childhood self is depicted as a robin, a feisty little bird full of life, dreams, and potential who has yet no clue of the cruelty of the world.

Consequently, the characters in her life are, too, bestowed upon fictional characters from stories that have been told before and/or are familiar in some way to the listener (aIMee the girl from this allegorical high school which is actually Kim Kardashian, Peter the boy who never grew up and stayed forever in Neverland who actually is her long-term ex partner, both her and her lover's separate romantic involvements imagined as Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus, her real life therapist referred to as The Professor etc). By using the representation of well-known characters from widely popular stories and myths with names and all, she creates an even deeper line of emotional connection with the listener. Then, the 4th wall is delightfully broken in Clara Bow, where she refers to Clara Bow and Stevie Nicks as the inherent precedents to Taylor Swift. But what's even more brilliant about this is that in this way, she is making Taylor Swift into a character in and of itself. She is actually attempting to externalize Taylor Swift from Taylor the real-life woman. By narrating her stories through tangible entities presented as completely external to herself, she is inhibited by the safety of this fictional/allegorical lense through which she's allowing her stories to be consumed, and as a result, she has unlimited freedom to be more personal than she has ever been in her art before.

Cassini Spacecraft Oil, 18 x 24 in, 2018 In our pursuit to understand the solar system we find ourselves in, we sent an explorer on a billion mile journey to the Saturnian system. The Cassini Spacecraft sent back amazing new data and images of Saturn and it's 62 known moons, 46 of which were unknown when Cassini left. We learned that the moon, Enceladus, may have everything it needs to support life deep in it's global ocean, Titan has a liquid methane sea, and so much more.

In 2017, low on fuel after twenty years in space and so much information gained, Cassini took several dives between Saturn and it's rings to learn a little more before it's mission came to an end. To avoid possible microbial contamination of any of Saturn's moons, Cassini dove and burned up in Saturn's atmosphere, while sending back it's final data. Prints: https://robrey.storenvy.com

Nature unveiling herself, Ernest Barrias, 1899, marble and onyx, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

The Grasshopper by Jules-Joseph Lefebvre (1872)

Allegory of Night, Léon Frédéric, 1891

🐺Hunger's Masque❤️‍🔥

Currently in my medieval era, which means I've been looking into a lot of illuminated manuscripts and such. I LOVE the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (the Barometz for Dungeon Meshi fans lol, I see y'all <3) and wanted to make... SOME kind of thing involving it. Everything kind of morphed into an allegory for power imbalances and predatory love. Very please with how it turned out!