I made this piece for my stu­dio fi­nal fresh­man year. The idea was to re-cre­ate a fa­ble and ap­ply it to con­tem­po­rary times. I chose sleep­ing beauty be­cause I’m amused by the irony of be­ing con­nected through tech­nol­ogy yet we of­ten find our­selves re­moved from re­al­ity.

I re­mem­ber count­less hours scrolling, stum­bling through im­ages of war abroad feel­ing some­thing-anger, guilt, help­less­ness, and pain-and in the same feed 10 sec­onds later fall back into the stream of empti­ness, memes, and toxic self val­i­da­tion.

I wanted to im­age that con­tra­dic­tion. There are news­pa­pers and a mag­a­zine with war im­ages by a bath­tub filled with likes and fol­low­ers, while I numbly scroll through the iPhone with a VR head­set.