Demon Gangster Girl
Quote from CohentheWriter on 31. August 2022, 7:32Museum Link: https://app.museumofcryptoart.com/collection/the-permanent-collection?collection=0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430&token=17364&page=4
Source Link: https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430:17364?tab=overview
Date Minted: September 23, 2020 (Happy birthday, Dad!)
Artist Description: Demon Gangster Girl - original character design and animation by Shelly Soneja. HD video available as unlockable content.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
It’s like someone made a visual recreation of the term “pop punk.” Not just someone, but Shelly Soneja, no stranger to collecting pop art and no stranger to creating it either. Like Kitty Bast, Soneja focuses her creation on female characters, they of big eyes and highly-emotive expressions, with vivid colors and inspirations pulled from all manner of historical and pop-cultural sources. Kabuki masks make an appearance in Kitsune Misaki, while the Bride of Frankenstein has the aptly-titled composition Bride of Frankenstein to herself. There are little girls with pink pigtails munching on anthropomorphic jelly donuts. There are angels and demons and mermaids and fantasy characters from across the worldwide canon. And then there’s Demon Gangster Girl, a somewhat campy and extremely punkish marriage of a number of inspirations: Hokusai, Yakuza movies, Gothic fantasy ala Hellboy, it’s all present and married to just a dash of sex appeal. Though lacking the more evocative coloration of Soneja’s most boisterous works, Demon Gangster Girl is beautifully composed, a quiet achievement of shape and compositional technique. It’s suggestive without being erotic. It plays on our preconceptions about female sensuality, at once challenging and confirming them. It’s highly imaginative, highly detailed, and highly suggestive, not in the way of sexual innuendo but in the way of action. Demon Gangster Girl is built into an esoteric narrative that Soneja’s implies but which we ultimately confirm. We play an active part in the scene, extrapolating the character’s aspects into experiences, stories, situations, and settings. We are enlisted by Soneja, and by the character she’s created, to take an active role in determining the characteristics of the highly-suggestible Demon Gangster Girl. It’s hard to tell what exactly is in the character’s expression —yellow eyes, it seems, are anything but easy to read— as she turns her head around to look at us, but “Come with me,” seems an entirely appropriate reading.
Who are we to deny her?
I don’t have a name for the position in which the titular Demon Gangster Girl stands, and I don’t know exactly what she wants from me. She stands with her chest puffed out, but away from us. Her back curved inward, her butt curved outward, and one hand curled down at the side of her hip, the other —the one holding a long, wooden baseball bat in a not-unthreatening manner— outstretched on her left side. Her head we see in profile. Her one yellow eye is tucked within long black lashes which obstruct whatever she may be trying to insinuate. So does the dark mask she wears over her face and mouth, so that we can only see the outline of her nose; everything else is hidden. A mop of shiny, seemingly well-conditioned green hair cascades over her ears and the top of her head, cut haphazardly shoulder-length, and pushed out of the way of the two tall, sharp horns protruding from her scalp. Two demon horns to match the one demon tail —as red and pointy as those from a Halloween costume— and the entire body wrapped in pinkish skin. Not as actively threatening in appearance as perhaps the title would suggest, but, again, it’s not about what the Demon Gangster Girl is right now; it’s about what she’ll do a moment from now. As we see her, she’s content to stand in front of a giant, perfectly-circular moon that glows —literally glows, dimming and alighting with soothing, metronomic speed— behind her, framing quite beautifully her skull, her shoulders, and the crook of her baseball-bat-wielding arm. In terms of outfit, she’s got serious style: A purple jacket accented by a puffy collar, bearing upon it a fiery demon’s skull, perhaps a gang’s symbol. Short soffe shorts and torn fishnet stocking complete the outfit, and all the while, in the black background, a collection of clouds bob nascently in the implied night. We don’t know whether the Demon Gangster Girl is about to get into trouble, or whether she’s just finished with it. But trouble certainly swirls around her. And that implication emerges entirely from the details.
It’s all about the girl. The entire piece is meant to highlight her, literally spotlight her in the middle of the frame. It’s interesting to have a subject so tightly-detailed, so realistically conveyed —from the folds of her sleeves to the shadows running down the back of her sweatshirt— and a background that is so intentionally unreal, devoid of detail, and manipulated for the evocation of the character as opposed to for its own merit. Not a cityscape behind her. Not an actual setting. But a very abstract series of insinuations: about weather, about the wind, about time of day. But nothing concrete. The Demon Girl does not exist in an actual plane, but in a plane we also fill in with our imagination, just as we fill in the circumstances of her story. It is only the character’s physical form Soneja provides us with, almost like a Metaverse avatar we’ve chosen to explore a Virtual World with. Everything but the appearance is unsettled. Soneja leaves sizable bits of the composition conspicuously unfilled so that we may come to understand our place in establishing Demon Gangster Girl’s identity. Soneja does not want us to leave without recognizing the power she’s bestowing upon us.
Source Link: https://rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4c06a461d2430:17364?tab=overview
Date Minted: September 23, 2020 (Happy birthday, Dad!)
Artist Description: Demon Gangster Girl - original character design and animation by Shelly Soneja. HD video available as unlockable content.
CohentheWriter’s Commentary:
It’s like someone made a visual recreation of the term “pop punk.” Not just someone, but Shelly Soneja, no stranger to collecting pop art and no stranger to creating it either. Like Kitty Bast, Soneja focuses her creation on female characters, they of big eyes and highly-emotive expressions, with vivid colors and inspirations pulled from all manner of historical and pop-cultural sources. Kabuki masks make an appearance in Kitsune Misaki, while the Bride of Frankenstein has the aptly-titled composition Bride of Frankenstein to herself. There are little girls with pink pigtails munching on anthropomorphic jelly donuts. There are angels and demons and mermaids and fantasy characters from across the worldwide canon. And then there’s Demon Gangster Girl, a somewhat campy and extremely punkish marriage of a number of inspirations: Hokusai, Yakuza movies, Gothic fantasy ala Hellboy, it’s all present and married to just a dash of sex appeal. Though lacking the more evocative coloration of Soneja’s most boisterous works, Demon Gangster Girl is beautifully composed, a quiet achievement of shape and compositional technique. It’s suggestive without being erotic. It plays on our preconceptions about female sensuality, at once challenging and confirming them. It’s highly imaginative, highly detailed, and highly suggestive, not in the way of sexual innuendo but in the way of action. Demon Gangster Girl is built into an esoteric narrative that Soneja’s implies but which we ultimately confirm. We play an active part in the scene, extrapolating the character’s aspects into experiences, stories, situations, and settings. We are enlisted by Soneja, and by the character she’s created, to take an active role in determining the characteristics of the highly-suggestible Demon Gangster Girl. It’s hard to tell what exactly is in the character’s expression —yellow eyes, it seems, are anything but easy to read— as she turns her head around to look at us, but “Come with me,” seems an entirely appropriate reading.
Who are we to deny her?
I don’t have a name for the position in which the titular Demon Gangster Girl stands, and I don’t know exactly what she wants from me. She stands with her chest puffed out, but away from us. Her back curved inward, her butt curved outward, and one hand curled down at the side of her hip, the other —the one holding a long, wooden baseball bat in a not-unthreatening manner— outstretched on her left side. Her head we see in profile. Her one yellow eye is tucked within long black lashes which obstruct whatever she may be trying to insinuate. So does the dark mask she wears over her face and mouth, so that we can only see the outline of her nose; everything else is hidden. A mop of shiny, seemingly well-conditioned green hair cascades over her ears and the top of her head, cut haphazardly shoulder-length, and pushed out of the way of the two tall, sharp horns protruding from her scalp. Two demon horns to match the one demon tail —as red and pointy as those from a Halloween costume— and the entire body wrapped in pinkish skin. Not as actively threatening in appearance as perhaps the title would suggest, but, again, it’s not about what the Demon Gangster Girl is right now; it’s about what she’ll do a moment from now. As we see her, she’s content to stand in front of a giant, perfectly-circular moon that glows —literally glows, dimming and alighting with soothing, metronomic speed— behind her, framing quite beautifully her skull, her shoulders, and the crook of her baseball-bat-wielding arm. In terms of outfit, she’s got serious style: A purple jacket accented by a puffy collar, bearing upon it a fiery demon’s skull, perhaps a gang’s symbol. Short soffe shorts and torn fishnet stocking complete the outfit, and all the while, in the black background, a collection of clouds bob nascently in the implied night. We don’t know whether the Demon Gangster Girl is about to get into trouble, or whether she’s just finished with it. But trouble certainly swirls around her. And that implication emerges entirely from the details.
It’s all about the girl. The entire piece is meant to highlight her, literally spotlight her in the middle of the frame. It’s interesting to have a subject so tightly-detailed, so realistically conveyed —from the folds of her sleeves to the shadows running down the back of her sweatshirt— and a background that is so intentionally unreal, devoid of detail, and manipulated for the evocation of the character as opposed to for its own merit. Not a cityscape behind her. Not an actual setting. But a very abstract series of insinuations: about weather, about the wind, about time of day. But nothing concrete. The Demon Girl does not exist in an actual plane, but in a plane we also fill in with our imagination, just as we fill in the circumstances of her story. It is only the character’s physical form Soneja provides us with, almost like a Metaverse avatar we’ve chosen to explore a Virtual World with. Everything but the appearance is unsettled. Soneja leaves sizable bits of the composition conspicuously unfilled so that we may come to understand our place in establishing Demon Gangster Girl’s identity. Soneja does not want us to leave without recognizing the power she’s bestowing upon us.