Bio:
Arrington de Dionyso (b. January 4 1975 Chicago) is an artist and musician based in Olympia, Washington since 1992. He founded the underground rock band Old Time Relijun in 1995 and "Trans-Utopian Trance Punk" group Malaikat dan Singa in 2009. His artwork has appeared on countless album covers, concert posters and fashion designs. In 2015 he was the featured artist for the Spring/Summer Men's collection for Saint Laurent Paris. In 2017 he produced a documentary about trance rituals in West Java, Indonesia and in 2018 he created an animated film called "The Emergency Labyrinth," comprising nearly 200,000 photos of sumi ink drawings on one gigantic paper scroll.
Artist Statement:
In 2017 I was visited by a film crew from Sweden. There were making a documentary about the "Fake News" epidemic in the United States of America and interviewing people who had been negatively affected by doxxing, trolling, and other online hate resulting from deliberate disinformation. They wanted to film me at work in my art studio in the creation of a new painting. For this project I chose to create a contemporary take on Artemisia Gentileschi's masterpiece "Judith Beheads Holofernes". In her original painting Gentileschi supplanted the Biblical figure of Holofernes with a portrait of the man who had raped her. In my version I gave a special nod to the anonymous horde who had subjected me and my family to a hateful campaign. The painting was later shared on social media, and sales from the prints used to raise funds for causes such as Planned
Parenthood, Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter, all projects that would have been repulsive to those initially targeting me with their online hate.
"How Do Men Confront Their Demons Part I & II" feels pretty self-explanatory to me. Created during the initial wave of the "Me Too" movement, it was a time when men in the creative industries and politics were being called on to self-reflect on abuses of power and what Jung called "The Shadow". In these renderings I confront the fact that a great deal of this discourse was limited to online forums and that the true confrontation of one's inner demons is much subtler and more complicated that self-congratulatory virtue signaling on social media.