The Pilgrim’s Living Room Crucifixion; Mona Lisa Hyper-Gamble #172

I used to live in an apartment building in the Yucca Corridor of Hollywood—a tall structure on the corner of Whitley and Franklin. Kenneth Anger lived there for most of the time I was there, until he was eventually kicked out. I’d see him now and then in the elevator or lobby. We barely interacted, but once he told me, “No one pays for your dinners when you’re old.” He was cranky. My girlfriend at the time wanted to befriend him, but I was wary—I’d heard stories about him hexing people. At one point he tried to buy her socks and claimed he had a wife and child living in Hawaii.
That apartment was the center of my creative world for years. I made a number of paintings there, most notably a series of still lifes featuring my dining room table with the Capitol Records Building in the background. Over time, construction projects transformed the skyline entirely. Views like that are rare in LA unless you're in the Hills.
One large painting I made during that time was titled P, based on Albrecht Dürer’s engraving St. Eustace. In my version, I’m the central figure, walking through a reimagined Hollywood landscape. That painting—and a black-and-white companion—would be shown at the Hollywood Roosevelt a couple years later. P was originally intended as part of a larger series inspired by Dürer’s masterworks: St. Jerome in His Study, Melencolia I, and Knight, Death, and the Devil. I had also read about an unfinished engraving attributed to Dürer called Crucifixion in Outline— I wanted to finish it, to make it mine. When Leyla asked me to propose a project for Verse, two ideas came to mind. One was to do my own crucifixion NFT, based on the unfinished Dürer piece. The other was to build a work around the couch in my old apartment. I had already painted two versions of myself sitting on that couch—those were the only works I made that looked into the apartment rather than out. In those paintings I’m sitting on the couch looking into a mirror, inspired by a Balthus painting with a young girl in the same pose. Each of my versions would include one of my cats: Chelsea, Marshmallow, Rascal, Carrot Cake (Cakey), Babs, Chicklet, Puttanesca, Cheeto, and Angel Wing Begonia. I only completed paintings of Carrot Cake and Puttanesca. It’s been about a year since I released ParkerIto.net, my first NFT project on Ethereum. Since then, I’ve launched three collections on Solana: Collection 2 for Solana, a shadow version of my first ETH project; Horses?2, a rapid-fire homage to the Horses? Solana collection; and Drilady, a PFP collection inspired by Drifella, which itself was inspired by Mifella, which was inspired by Milady. Before ParkerIto.net, I had never used tools like HashLips and had barely experimented with AI in my work. HashLips was originally built to pump out clean, normie-ready PFPs—but the Solana avant-garde (aka Gay NFT) hijacked it, pushing it toward traitmaxxing: chaotic, over-layered, Dada-by-default collages. This approach has been completely inspiring to me. Over the past year, I’ve developed a kind of mastery with these Hashlips—not technical mastery, but something more intuitive. A workflow that matches the way my brain works. I guess you could call that a voice, an aesthetic language.

Now that language is more ripened, it brings me to this new project with Verse: The Pilgrim’s Living Room Crucifixion; Mona Lisa Hyper-Gamble. It’s really an amalgamation of everything I’ve done so far. A crucifixion scene with my couch. I’d still call it “traitmaxxed,” but it’s very specific, more refined and distilled. This time, I’m trying to create a clean 3D space, as opposed to the flat, jagged, spaces typical of the traitmaxxed aesthetic. The entire image is in one-point perspective. I’ve had to draw shadows to unify the lighting—it actually feels like painting, like learning about light in real time.
This isn’t a PFP collection. But there’s a PFP collection embedded inside it. The collection has horses, it has knights, it has Drilady,—like Russian dolls stacked within each other. It’s a nested system. An NFT inside an NFT. A Gesamtkunstwerk for the blockchain.
As I sit here writing this, I discover that Crucifixion in Outline wasn’t actually by Dürer. It was a pastiche, collaged together from his drawings by someone working in his style. That feels right.

Parker Ito