Drill Baby, A Narratively Tattooed Infant From Jason Clay Lewis.

Artist Jason Clay Lewis, whose unusual work I have blogged about before when I featured his Drop Dead Gorgeous exhibit and his wonderful engraved bullets, has given birth to yet another compelling project.



His "Drill Baby" (the name of which is undoubtedly a nod to Sarah Palin's oddly foreboding rallying cry "Drill, Baby, Drill") is a lifelike infant tatted with the victims and the symbolic perpetrators of the horrendous BP offshore drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.


above: Drill Baby and detail, Jason Clay Lewis, 2010. 18 1/4" x 9 1/4" x 6 3/4"

Made with vinyl rubber, mohair, oil paint, plaster and aluminum armature, the hyper realistic-looking newborn seems to sleep blissfully and innocently as the images on his body tell us another story.




The infant has artfully drawn tattoos of some of the tragic oil spill's most innocent victims - Pelicans and Seagulls - along with the clicheéd tattoo imagery of Koi, swimming in blackened waters, aligning his arms.




On his right inner thigh is a clipper ship (a recurring theme in Jason's work representing plagues), complete with floating oil barrels and an idyllic deserted island blackened by an oil spill. An Eagle or Falcon, in the midst of attack made, talons exposed, swoops in on the infants left inner thigh.



Least subtle, is the image of a religious figure (the Virgin Mary is another icon the repeatedly appears in Jason's work) grasping a dripping gas nozzle, the representation of the product that is at the core of the political, economical and ecological tragedy. Notice that the infant's nipple becomes her breast.



Jason Clay Lewis' work often combines fetishes and death with religious symbolism. The artist currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Jason Clay Lewis

Jason Clay Lewis: Drop Dead Gorgeous And Ammo As Art

Like many artists, Jason Clay Lewis seems to have a fascination with death. The majority of his unique sculptures and original art are either made from rat poison, include skulls or reappropriate religious icons like Buddha and the Virgin Mary in fur and foam. His collections have names like The Black Death, The God Of War and Devour... you get the picture. Despite the glut of macabre art on the market, I do find his pieces alluring and bet you will too.

He recently had an exhibition at the 31Grand in New York (the gallery is now closed) called Drop Dead Gorgeous that featured the highly bloggable D-Con Mary and Poison Christ shown below.

D-Con Mary:



Poison Christ:


But I also wanted to share with you his engraved bullets.

His engraved bullets were created back in 2002, but if you haven't seen them, they are very interesting pieces. By simply engraving words and or images on real rifle and colt 45 bullets, they take on a personal narrative and become either mementos or, in some cases, wishful harbingers of death. Take a look.

Celebrities: Justin Timberlake and Pamela Anderson


Power Players: George W Bush and Donald Rumsfeld


Tragedies And Assassinations: April 14th, 1912 and December 7th, 1941


Pin Up Girls:


The Seven Deadly Sins: Gluttony and Anger (technically, Wrath)


Zapruder Memento: The asassination of John F. Kennedy


And in 2004, as part of his Devour collection, he created 12 Shunga bullets (erotic japanese art)


A quote from the artist:

“As an artist, my approach has always been, intentionally, to confound and challenge attempts to make things fit into what we already know and think. I strive to question perceived beauty, passion, life, death, and creation. I have an urgent conviction that art is a passionate and essential affair, a matter of life and death, where one senses the only response to death is art. Without glossing over the violence of the natural world I ask questions about man’s suicidal folly, the one we call progress, a merger into a religion of commerce and profit, of false facades, and using a strategy to make us reconsider our world of visual imagery. I tinker with these visual explanations, trying to give them purpose, direction, and meaning. Always perfectly aware that knowing this constant probing does not have a sequence to a perfect solution. Atypical and fascinating, as an adventurer blending expression, analysis, and experience, I use every means and media available to explore the love of knowledge and depict limits, while trying to push those limits even farther. My interest in unique materials helps to develop my ideas of attraction verses repulsion allowing my work to have both a strong visceral feeling while maintaining a direct cerebral presence.”

Jason currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
See all his interesting work here.