Good, Evil, & Death by Blockchain - An exclusive interview with Terrell Jones
“These characters are living and breathing in my head and I’d like to find ways for them to exist that way in others’ as well.”
Scrolling through CryptoTwitter while presumably in the anger/depression phase of a market cycle has been interesting. FTX-CoNtAgIoN, regulation worries, conference attendance roll calls, and FUDing of more apparently everything. However on this day, it was about discovering another one of Web3’s great new talents. After my personal discovery of Willea Zwey’s art and her subsequent success at Sotheby’s, I’m starting to refer to them as “Contagion Class 2022”. Enter Terrell Jones on my feed. With some normal Twitter scrolling, I come across this image and I just stop.
“What the f…” was my initial reaction, but then I was struck by the overall clean muted aesthetic of the image. Followed by the title “Born 2 Die”, and finally the accompanying post on twitter explaining the burn mechanism.
I instantly had an appreciation of the thought that went into the play on imagery, words, and corresponding web3 functionality newly offered by manifold.
The skeleton clearly holding the silhouette of a new born something. That something being created from dollar bills. Then amusingly have the promotion require the user to “burn” the piece on blockchain in order to receive the follow-up pieces in the collection. Brits might call it “cheeky”, I’ll just call it awesome.
Even after recognizing the play on words, I still had so many questions. Business Casual dressed horned-skeleton holding a sacrificial animal made of dollar bills???? As brash as that sounds, it was still so appealing to the eye. I visited his lynkfire link (which seems significantly more impressive than linktree i might add), and started looking up some of his other pieces.
I first landed on his “Good & Evil” SuperRare collection. A 5 piece collection minted between February and July 2022 depicting a young boy with a good and evil character on either side of his head. Exploring a little more I discovered his Space Boy collection as well as his most recent “Evil in Colour” pieces.
I remember the “Evil In Colour” pieces making their way to my timeline over the last two or so months, and I always thought they were fun but it wasn’t until I saw them as a complete collection that I really appreciated the aesthetic and character development across scenes.
Being as intrigued as I was with so many questions unanswered, I reached out and asked Terrell for permission to run this piece and give me more insight into what he calls “Pop-Precisionism”
Warren: So what was the transition like going from Space Boy, to Good & Evil, and now Evil In Colour? Do you continue to create for all 3 collections?
Terrell: I think for me, the Good & Evil and Joy & Wonder collections were fun to do but it was harder for me to imagine seeing them in galleries and museums. With Evil In Colour i’m able to tell stories similar to one’s in Good & Evil but do that while creating museum worthy art.
Warren: The 5 character personalities are really cool. What made you think of them? Could you ever see them having audio script or is your intent to let the community imagine the scenes?
Terrell: I can’t go too far into details but i’ve had talks about giving them their own series. I’d be very interested in that. These characters are living and breathing in my head and i’d like to find ways for them to exist that way in others’ as well.
Warren: With “Born 2 Die”, is this linking directly into the Evil In Colour story or is it separate?
Terrell: I wouldn’t say so. It’s way more of a surreal idea, seeing that that origami dollar is so big.
Warren: With Born 2 Die which came first: the name, the burn mechanism, or the origami-money art?
Terrell: The idea to burn. I heard that feature was coming to Manifold so i decided it was time to try something new.
Warren: If you could shout out one artist right now you really like, or are inspired by, who is that person?
Terrell: Grant Yun. Its been awesome seeing his success. He's definitely someone I look up to. I've never heard anyone say a bad thing about him. He's a great guy with great art and I'm glad I can call him a friend.
Damon, Turbo, Skelliot, Sable and Hefty in Pop Precisionism
One part of the interview that stuck with me was Terrell feeling as though some of his previous pieces were not “museum worthy art”. I won’t diminish his feelings of maturity and development across his work, but it did make me think. I witnessed more and more museums cater to “modern art” and open their arms to digital artists. The NFT technology that serves the art may be in a slight retrace of “hype”, but it feels like museums are as open as they’ve ever been to digital art and I think the guidelines of what classifies as “museum worthy” may be as subjective as they’ve ever been.
I think Terrell is gaining traction at the perfect time. 10ktf showed us what a project can do with story development on-chain, and Terrell has done a great job of leveraging new manifold capabilities. It makes me even more excited about the advancement of web3 art, story-telling, and “creative-tech play”. I’ll be following Pop Precisionism very closely.
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Willea Zwey’s Pre-Sotheby’s Collection available at ImNotArt:
