Edwardian Ball 2025
22 x 28
Edition of 250
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered
This poster is officially available at the show in SF. I will make a limited online launch of my Edwardian Ball 2025 poster through EQL opening on Monday, February 3, 2025 at 9 am PST. The launch closes on Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 9 am PST.
Visit the launch page for the release (countdown and launch):
It’s Edwardian Ball time again, and as always, it’s a great pleasure to work with Justin Katz, the Edwardian Ball impresario, and once again I had a lot of fun making this poster!
My Edwardian Ball posters always have an edge of social critique in them. They are done with a wink and a nod, in keeping with the enjoyment of attending such an elaborate period pageant.
Most of the attendees also realize that the Edwardian era was one of unabashed and ostentatious oligarchy, unrivaled economic imperialism and a presumed European superiority complex. It’s all of these things that makes the period so bizarre to us today. I’ve always endeavored to reveal this outrageous and bizarre sense of imperial entitlement in my Edwardian Ball posters, and keep them wild and fun.
I try to channel the spirit of our age in a non-linear way with each year’s Edwardian Ball poster, making allegory, or touching a simple parallel between our 21st Century experience and the far-away world of Edwardian “Society.”
This year’s poster has more than an edge of social critique.
“Ladies and gentlemen, politics is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing!” – Eugène Ionesco
The far-away oligarchy of the Edwardian period is being outdone by the sinister multi-centi-billionaire, hormone-jacked, space-racing, data-driven, artificially-intelligent, techno-oligarchs of the present day. The oligarchic musings of my entire series of posters for the Edwardian Ball come into focus as a prescient warning started many, many years ago.
This year’s poster emerges from my darkest imaginings of the near future: a deadly, skeletal, imperial monarch who rules by whim and decree, conquering Greenland, and establishing his dictatorship from the Gulf of America to the Arctic Circle.
Our potentate’s power-madness is symbolized by a scepter emblazoned with the Facebook logo. In an absurd touch, our techno-oligarch is accompanied by his royal rhinoceros draped in his ermine cloak.
The rhino is a thematic flourish first used in my 2013 Edwardian Ball poster, and is used here as a symbolic warning based on French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco’s play “The Rhinoceros.”
In Ionesco’s play citizens one-by-one inexplicably turn into brute, belligerent rhinoceroses. Written in 1959 the play is largely considered to be an allegory of social degradation and slow descent into fascist politics. It’s themes mirror our present-day social degradation and growing obsession with far-right ideology.
Today’s grandiose multi-centi-billionaire oligarchs are guided toward world domination by artificial intelligence, or as Ionesco said in his play: “Being a machine is a great way to avoid thinking.”
My 2025 poster for the Edwardian Ball was foreshadowed on January 15 by outgoing President Joe Biden’s unusually dire remarks delivered during his farewell address:
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.”
During incoming President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Ball on the evening of January 20, five days after Biden’s warning, Trump’s multi-centi-billionaire oligarchic sidekick Elon Musk thrust a pair of nazi salutes over the crowd attending his inaugural ball.
There, you’ve been warned.
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