THE PRICE OF GOLD SERIES (2015-18)
Digital Animations, sculpture, watercolors
Digital Animation Team
Production: Dirt Empire
Creative Director: Nicholas Rubin
Lead Compositor: Peter Panton
Lead Texture Artist: Joshua Vaughan
Lead Digital Sculpting and Modeling: Nicholas Rubin
Assistant Sculpting and Modeling: Zain Awais
Assistant Animator: Alexis Kadonsky
The Price of Gold Series is a group of projects that address environmental and cultural anxieties. Growing up in rural America, the forest was for me, a place that stimulated both terror and desire. I projected all kinds of fantasies onto the gnarled landscapes. Even now, the forest continues to maintain its powerful pull over my thoughts and fears, though the terrors projected onto that landscape have grown far more ominous in scope and scale as threat of environmental disaster darkens the horizon. It seems impossible to imagine an American landscape without the frame of profound worry for its future.
As a society, our worries are not limited to environmental apocalypse. The growing divide between the richest and poorest in America has expanded at an alarming rate. The concentration of wealth at the top pushes greed deep into the territory of perversion. Taken together, these concerns combine to form a fairly potent synthesis of fears. In the Labyrinth is an imaginary landscape built as a repository for those anxieties.