Pick Your King is an amalgamation of religious iconography cradled in black metal’s brutal aesthetic, made with pen, watercolor, and iron on ink transfer. Ink is applied onto linen canvas by a vinyl cutter jury-rigged with a ballpoint pen instead of a cutting blade. This mechanized application of pen allows Lloyd to directly appropriate devotional works from a plethora of religious denominations, and render them without formal deviation, like cut-and-paste collage, but through the intimate and organic medium of drawing.  

Lloyd’s identical treatment of the source materials, regardless of religious origin, brings to light the underlying aesthetic similarities of the world’s deities – or at least brings to the foreground stylistic trends shared by the monks, artisans, and gurus that first sought to portray them. The physicality of the deities is unhuman, or “extra”-human, and overwrought beyond the mortal spectrum of emotional expression. It is clear we cannot feel and act as the Gods do – and yet the Gods, as presented in this exhibition, are but separate iterations of a divine whole. Perhaps this a consequence of the Internet – the source from which Lloyd draws all of his imagery – blending visual distinctions born from cultural idiosyncrasy into a single, digital monomedium. But art is an ill-fitting vehicle to explain life’s divine mysteries. The first humans, perplexed by the order of the universe, filled the empty sky with beings in our image. Contemporary art is the inheritor of that tradition, a physical embodiment of spiritual yearning, and sole occupant of the distance between ourselves and God.