Artist Statement

My piece displays, in the first image, a watercolour picture of a hypothetical galaxy

featuring the words so it goes; and in the second image, a watercolour picture of the
slaughterhouse in which Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist from Slaughterhouse Five, was
imprisoned, featuring the words send help.
I chose these images to depict because, in the book Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt
Vonnegut, that point in space and the Dresden slaughterhouse are versions of each other.
The text suggests that when Billy thinks he is being abducted by the Tralfamadorians, an alien
race (hence the space scene), he is actually experiencing PTSD from his days in WWII
(hence the slaughterhouse where he and his fellow prisoners of war were kept). As for the
text, so it goes is a recurring theme in the book, suggesting the absence of free will and
Billys dependency on fate. Send help is the same number of characters, and I thought it to
be appropriate because it suggests Billy to be, while famously unstuck in time (Vonnegut,
23), stuck in his fate like he was stuck in the war. If the Tralfamadorians are the Germans, if
space and Tralfamadore are the places he was imprisoned as a POW, then so it goes is
really a cry for help.
I included visual similarities in the pieces such as the trees at the end of the house
and the planet in the bottom left corner, the slope of the star patterns and the slope of the
roof, and the scattering of brick details and stars. The text font was something that I saw
online and thought would fit well with these images as well as with this project, as they
required math tools to construct. Mainly, they added a geometric element that was more clear
than those that had been painted. The theme I chose when creating this piece is
wilful/blissful ignorance, and I exhibited this by showing how Billy Pilgrim chose to view the
world compared to how it actually was.