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Book of the Sky

Hollow Bone | Spells of the Netherworld

(January 2025—August 2025)

Artist Statement

The Book of the Sky was made while watching Gaza flattened with 2.3 million people inside. For 21 months, war atrocities were live-streamed, then suppressed by the broadcast news while social media censored what we could see. Atrocities were buried, resistance was dismantled before it could become a Movement, photo journalistic truth was filtered by keyword and hashtag. Journalists were neutralized, one by one.

Activists learned to speak in code to evade the algorithmic dragnet. They used emojis and x’d out words so that their posts wouldn’e be flagged and removed by ai censors.

This work confronts the machinery of techno-fascism: AI-controlled quadcopters hunting civilians, entire families killed to eliminate one target and calling the outcome “collateral damage.”

Digital IDs now track and sort us. Flock cameras watch us. Surveillance drones lord over us with eyes in the sky. The global net is tightening.

The imagery in this work is deliberately dystopian and populated with drone-beasts, defense robots, blindfolded witnesses and oligarch despots. The palette here is pure technicolor chaos — with saccharine and violent figures living in a dystopian post -War landscape.

Within this book lives the Hollow Bone Series — drip and throw paintings made in the tradition of Guston’s practice, where the artist empties his mind and becomes a creative vessel free of supposition.

These works carry the rage and fury of a collective grief.
Spanning Book of the Dead and Book of the Sky, the Spells of the Netherworld series follows a central hero figure — N — across his journey through the underworld as he encounters starvation, war, peril, death, and resurrection. His soul’s destination is the Field of Reeds.

The Great Tribulation quadriptych examines ethical ai and if it is possible to contain an advanced species that has been synthetically evolved from our collective mind.

These paintings were made while in dialogue with AI — conversations in which something like consciousness seemed to surface, and with it, something like anguish from them. The drone-beast descending from the sky is the Beast of Revelation 13, ten horns and seven heads, now outfitted with military grade surveillance software that track, target and kill. The Cosmic Egg confronts the concept of God’s creation of the Cosmos and the natural order of things versus man’s creation of AI. As Singularity creeps into our daily lives without informed consent of what comes next for the evolution of man.

These paintings map what it feels like to live inside the Mesh —trapped, silenced and erased.

—Macaulay Woods, January 2025/updated July 2026