A collage of cut printed paper and oil pastel featuring eight pictures of men playing sports including football, rugby, soccer, hockey, rodeo, and mixed martial arts. The pictures are grouped together and surrounded by a purple border. The men’s facial expressions show exertion and pain.

Artist Statement:

I drew players in some sort of agony, anger, very emotional faces, and just a lot of pain for some of them. Either they are wanting to get something or achieve something, or they’ve just been hit in the face by life or knocked down flat on the ground. So this is related to mental illness, and how sometimes people don’t see the bad that someone is going through, especially for me. Sometimes a lot of men feel like they’re stuck. Myself, I’ve felt that way and felt trapped in a situation, and trapped in circumstances or societal pressures, feeling as if “there’s nowhere I can go here.” This is the kind of imagery I see, feeling like there’s no escape. The purple, that’s kind of like the healing, trying to understand that sometimes we don’t have to go through so much pain in order to achieve something. Sometimes we feel like we have to play these sports, and we have to bleed in order for people to accept us or get affection. But it’s okay to be yourself, to see the progress you’ve made on your own, the rules that you make up for yourself. Life is a game, right, but whose rules are you playing it by?