Here's Devs Qvi, a new version of one of my older digital photo collages. It's based on an illustration from the "Sforza Hours," a medieval prayer book (see below). The title includes a deliberate transliteration of the original caption, which was "Deus Qui" ("God Who" in Latin) and used the ancient Roman "V" instead of "U".I'd found the Sforza illustration on a CD-ROM disk of old paintings and was looking for a way to base an art piece on it when I came across some (cheap bootleg) "Outer Space Men" toys in a retro store in Los Angeles. I was delighted by the number of formal correspondences between the St. Michael figure and "Commander Comet" - the wings, the red boots, the shape of the scale balance versus the shape of the crossbow, etc - as well as between the Devil and "Colossus Rex", so I used them in the piece.
I had a hard time not feeling sympathy for the Devil, trapped as he is in predestination, but I also admired the merciless innocence of the angel, and his fabulous blue bouffant. As a funny side note, the Devil's face in the older (1997!) version was posed by a friend who was a practicing Satanist.
