Bella Blaze
Hello!!! My name is Bella Blaze (they/them), and I live in OKC. I've been super excited to collaborate with Oscillator Press to put out this shirt design! Jenna and Eric---U rock ; ) !!! This is the first t-shirt design I've had printed!
I tried to be thoughtful about how I wanted the wearer of the shirt to feel, what the picture would say and to whom it would be speaking. This shirt would be appropriate for eVeRY occasion.. but! is especially ideal for being home alone, watching the geese at the lake, and waving at a friend you haven't seen in 6 months while passing each other from your cars on the street (at least, you think it was them... can't really tell because of the mask... whoever it was, they waved back!)
I've been spending almost all of my time at home because of the pandemic. Lately, I've just been doing my little things on repeat everyday for this 2020 eternity. I've mostly been keeping to myself, and because of this my needs for my clothing have changed. I choose what I wear knowing that the only person that I will see is my own self in the mirror. I wanted to make a shirt for you to wear for yourself.
I've been trying out a bunch of different relaxation techniques to deal with anxiety. One thing I've been trying out, to some success, is guided visualization meditations. The ones where they describe walking through a natural landscape and looking up at the sun through the trees... I was first familiarized with these meditations through cartoons, I think. I remember some angry, exaggerated character told to close their eyes and imagine themself on a beach drinking a pina colada and the steam stops pouring out of their ears... I've only seen the ocean once since the age of 3, and have learned the beach ones do not work for me. Imagining something I'm unfamiliar with taxes extra mental energy that ruins the focus. WHAT THE FUCK DOES SEA AIR SMELL LIKE???
The ones that work for me are the ones that describe landscapes I'm more familiar with. When I'm guided through a forest or alongside a river, it's connected to a real memory of somewhere I've been here in Oklahoma. The landscape I made is loosely based on the last place I went camping. I wanted to replicate the experience of imagining in these guided meditations. They always end with something like "this is a place you can return to at any time you want, wherever you are..." It's comforting to think of these images in this way. As if they're a living landscape folded up in my back pocket, and I can just pull it out to teleport there like magic.
In the fantasy world of this design, there are some cute mandrake-demons lounging in a river outside the mouth of a cave. The viewer looks out from inside of the cave, the mandrakes looking into the cave back at you, and they say, "Together, we will create a world of our dreams." The mandrakes are connected to the natural landscape, and lead you to take in all the little flowers and details and... skulls??.. and stay a while to imagine the sound of the water rolling by... A corner of a vandalized brick-wall, half-submerged in the water, reads, "TEAR IT DOWN." Other loose bricks repeat the motif of an eye, pressed with time into the river-bed. There are small hints at something that was before and is far gone.
As a genre, fantasy can be a place of critique, but it can also be a place for hopeful reimagining. Sometimes when all there is to see is disaster in every direction, it feels like art and entertainment are the least useful things to be putting out. The call for abolition of police, prisons, and ICE has become louder, along with the call to return stolen land to Indigenous peoples. Dismantling these systems requires a total reimagining of our world. This is when people need imagination, relief, comfort, and connection---along with all the other hard world being done. Fantasies of fairy princesses and ultra-exclusive Mars colonies are tired and often harmful. This is how we have super celeb fae music girly ex-anti-imperialist hooked up with the wealth devouring space lord parading across the internet like they're the protagonists of some cute YA sci-fi novel. Fantasy, luxury, entertainment, and recreation need to be written by abolitionists, LGBTQIA2S+, and BIPOC.
In creating hopeful reimagation-type fantasy, I try to think of a future where luxurious experiences and objects are divorced from a capitalist world. This is often not aligned with the real world we live in now. Here in the real world, the rich rich will pollute the entire world just so they can turn that profit into a super yacht with an infinity pool at their second summer home on the beach for relaxing after a long day of robbery and murder. The rest of us are stuck with YouTube guided visualization meditations during 15 minute breaks at minimum wage jobs fighting off a mid-shift panic attack. I try to imagine luxury and recreation that is nondestructive, and accessible to all. Everyone deserves to have times of celebration, to be well, and to feel happy.
Do you see it, too?
