Vintage Skull

Nesting Doll X-Ray

Skull 2 

Home Taping Is Dead

Live Fast Die Young

Punk

Mariachi

Originality is the true making of an artist. The ability to put two completely contrasting things together, and make it work, is the talent of only a true creative mind. One of the recurring features in Ali’s work is the skull, and the skeleton. An object normally associated with death and horror, their inclusion in an illustration depicting flowers, Russian dolls, and a Mohican-wearing Punk seems somewhat ambiguous, the mark of an illustrator trying to send a message perhaps. Floral girlishness meets deathly skull is perhaps a concoction used to address the stereotypes and associations we put together with certain objects, an ironic illustration to make us think about the ways we perceive things. Perhaps, the juxtaposition of an object such as a skull, and a punk, is in fact not as oppositional as first thought. After all, it could be argued that “punk”, in the true anarchic and rebellious sense of the word, is dead. Not only is it a historically-specific subculture, precise to the 1970s notions of anti-establishment and anti-authoritarianism going on at the time; but it is also a movement that cannot be rekindled for fear of it becoming mainstream, contradictive, a copy of something long past. 
 
Ali’s use of the skull in images of flowers, vintage, punk and tapes, serves a multiple purpose. It challenges stereotypes and associations, whilst also communicating the notion that death can be connected to anything. Paradoxically, death might be thought of as a living organism from which none can escape, machine, human, or otherwise. On another, lighter note, the juxtaposition of death and, say, a mariachi, is just plain funny in its absurd combination.
 
Website: Aligulec.carbonmade.com