Illustration:
Second Place, Most Creative

Christian De Castro
UCLA School of Arts & Architecture

2001 Calendar

Artist's Statement: 2001 Calendar started out as an assignment for an advanced print class. The assignment was to create a calendar for the new millennium. I wanted to do something unconventional, so I chose to write a short story that would take place in the course of a year and then illustrate it in the form of a calendar. I wanted to explore the themes of time, technology, identity, and narrative.

I started by creating a premise significant to the year 2001, which is the official start of the millennium. As a modern society, we have reached a staggering amount of technological saturation. Everything in our modern world has become common and prefabricated. Life in the city robs individuals of a sense of humanity and self. It is a life of paranoia, fear and an overwhelming sadness.

The calendar represents a story about a man who is born in the wild and goes to live in the city. There, he encounters a world of tremendous evil. Demon-like machines emerge from the wasted cityscape and slowly transform him into one of them, a perfect, sightless, mindless machine.

The panel starts out with a rendering of Michelangelo's Adam, man from God; man in his natural state. The shapes and lines are organic and rich, but as time passes something happens. He becomes sad. His body parts are taken away, his skin is burned, his mind warped, a legion of robots and machines steal his humanity. These technological demons of the city overwhelm him, making days and months disappear. The richness of the human form and line are replaced with the language of dirty machinery. He is robbed of his eyes, hands, and heart to create a perfect machine, something no longer natural or human. He becomes, not the muscular beautiful image of man, but a sterile metallic zombie. But as the robots create identical beings, a strange, mischievous face comes creeping from behind the machinery ready to disrupt the order with her own uniqueness.