A dismembered arm holds a wet, bleeding bundle of hair. The amount of liquid that is dripping from this greasy mop seems unnatural, like it's absorbed an entire body's-worth of piss and blood. Next to it are a few lines scrawled in the same heavy metal handwriting that covers three-ring binders and bathroom walls in junior highs across America: "There's nothing left / Stripped it all away / Sin voices, won't stop."
The words are from "Reflect the Filth," the title track of punk-metal band Battletorn's last album. The distinctly brutal penmanship — every "S" is a lightning bolt, every "T" an upside-down cross — is that of the band's frontman, who goes by the single name Omid. The drawings, however, are by Brent Stewart, a Nashville-based artist who is recognized mainly for photography and filmmaking, but who began making art the same way many others do: doodling in the margins of his textbook during Algebra I.
The book they made together is called Sin Voices. It is more than a collaboration — it's a kind of ritualized communion, an anti-antisocial project that purged both artist's demons on the page. Omid borrowed lyrics from his Battletorn songs, and Stewart drew pictures to illustrate them. Copies of the limited-edition book will be available in Studio 66 in the Arcade during this weekend's art crawl, and Stewart's drawings will line the gallery walls while Battletorn's catalog of minute-long thrashes play in the background.
Omid's bleak lyrics take root in his childhood. He grew up in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution, and was surrounded by violence on all sides, streets littered with bullet casings and lined with homes that were literally battle-torn. "Stuff was blowing up all around us," Omid remembers, "then we would walk to the grocery store the next day — there would be leveled buildings all around." Army tanks on patrol were visible outside his schoolhouse windows. "There was no safe place."
That desolation was internalized, and eventually it became all he knew. Sin voices, Omid explains, are the negative thoughts that we keep to ourselves, the ones only we can hear. The best way to deal with them is to bring them out, to turn them into something different. "It's always going to be there," Omid says of personal pain and suffering. "It's driving our decisions and our emotions. So there's really no choice but to dig the skeletons out, and pull the bandages off." That's why collaborations like Sin Voices are so valuable. The words and images are raw and repulsive, but if you get it — if you've ever felt that angst-ridden, existential self-loathing — you can't help but be drawn in.
On another page, a psychedelically cheerful bunny rabbit — more like a wide-eyed Easter bunny mascot than a realistic animal — lies split in two, a mess of ribcage, spine and intestines untwining and dripping fluids. That urgent opposition between what is outside and what is inside is reflected in Omid's words: "Black blood everywhere / Proof of decay inside."
"I think we all have some primitive fear/curiosity when we're really little that our stuffed animals may have real organs," Stewart says. "Until we realize it's just stuffing. Later, we bleed real blood, and we know we're different."
"We all have sin voices." Stewart says. "The book is a couple guys making lyrics and drawings in algebra class again ... except this time we mean it."
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