Vinberg's Battlecry, Thanksgiven

Rachelle Vinberg is a young skateboarder with a social media identity focused on being herself. Though she rose to internet stardom for being a beautiful and groovy trickster - she expresses regularly “just because you are my audience, does not give you the right to assume control of my creativity.” In the millennial age group there is an even smaller grouping, of people born after 1993 but before 1999 who are a curious 6 years of children growing up with both the pre technology and social media boom (the world where few had cell phones, and social networking didn’t go beyond the school phonebook) and the adolescent exposure to that world. 

My sister, born in 1993, and her community gained the same technology at the same time as myself, 4 years younger, mostly because the ‘things’ that came about hadn’t actually existed 4 years before. She grew up on Nintendo 64, I grew up on PlayStation 2, and a Wii came into both of our lives late enough that it was no more than a phase, whereas the final chunks of millennials, now 18, had a Wii and Facebook childhood.

Specifically in terms of social media - my sister’s age group sees the concept as an almost entirely different creature. Instagram blew up when I was in 8th grade, beginning the journey through puberty, teen angst and self awareness. She was nearing the end of high school with a core of friends, most of whom didn’t bother with instagram until late in college. By the middle of 9th grade, in a near taboo silence, it felt like my entire environment had become deeply invested in developing ourselves based on what would draw social media attention, rather than the previously easier concept of developing the self based on the self...

Now at the end of college, it blows my mind that a person’s occupation (a lucrative one at that) is to be a social media influencer - the profession of branding yourself as something - a wellness guru, a model, a sponsored traveller, the list goes on; and your only job is to share proof of doing that thing. A catch of having that world presented as the goal or worth of social media, is that (at least in my community of friends) people are being conditioned to focus on outward presentation, comparison, and becoming as much as someone else. The idea of success is dangerously close to being defined as what others think of us. The first retaliation to this development that I directly understood was Rachelle Vinberg - she did not post posed and  photo shopped bikini photos, she did not use a specific color scheme or subject, she didn’t make any kind of point out of pleasing her following - she just did what she wanted. 

After a few weeks of internet silence, she posted a beautiful photo of herself with the caption “I live a good life that I know, and here it is written in case I forget.” In all of the content I had absorbed up until that point across the accounts I followed, I couldn’t remember anyone saying something so clearly oriented to the self. The sentence rang in my head for months and bled into my reinvention of myself in art and social media. 

By starting to openly share my art - in essence the product of my Self - on social media, I started to take ownership of who I am and take pride in it, regardless of whether my number of followers went down, or the number of ‘likes’ wasn’t as high as normal. I started to take long sabbaticals from social networks and use them to interact with my physical world - the good life that I can physically know is good and be completely present in. As well as creating the proof specifically for myself to remember that life is good - even when doubt and fear creep in.

Creating these two abstract zentangle-esque illustrations was the meditation on Rachelle Vinberg’s mantra, and adopting the idea that I have the power to do whatever I with my mind, body, time, and energy, as long as I don’t cause preventable harm with my actions.