This series of images suggests a decaying character drawn from the visual vocabulary of mass media, photographed from my own source material, then photo-aged, burnt out from overuse, and twisted into a new, darker character.
A “Mickey Finn” references a drink laced with an incapacitating agent, particularly chloral hydrate, given to someone without their consent with the intent to incapacitate them or “knock them out”.
The drink was given to sailors on hiatus from commercial merchant ships, who, when ordering a drink, would be drugged and trafficked by being brought onto other ships as unpaid crew without their consent.
This reportedly happened to one of my 19th-century sailor ancestors, who was tricked into thinking they were being rewarded for their hard work and instead found themselves enslaved on a ship headed in a direction not of their choosing.
This metaphor of an animated mouse, an innocuous, entertaining television character, mutating into a sinister, manipulating cult figure is central to the Mickey Finn series.
All images on this website are watermarked and encoded with metadata to comply with copyright and image protection best practices.
