Head in the Sand stages a confrontation between myth and reality using an object designed to resist disaster: the sandbag. But in this case, the disaster is interior, invisible, and ongoing. Cartoonish smiles and exaggerated visuals wrap these symbols of urgency in a layer of absurdity, distorting their function into something both comical and deeply unsettling. Each bag is no longer a defense against rising waters—but against rising awareness.

At the heart of this work is the paradox of the comforting lie. We learn to tell stories that make sense of contradiction: to soothe children with visions of fairness while modeling a world of power imbalances, to smile through dread, to package instability in digestible narratives. These fictions are not incidental—they are sacred, rehearsed. In this, Head in the Sand recalls Joseph Campbell’s notion of myth as a necessary structure through which humans interpret chaos. According to Campbell, myth is not about truth but meaning; it is a mirror in which a society sees itself in a form it can tolerate.

But this series challenges the function of myth in the modern context, where repetition has overtaken meaning and simulation has replaced ritual. The painted sandbags become ironic relics of a culture clinging to the myths it no longer believes, yet still performs. The cartoon becomes a new archetype: not the trickster, not the hero—but the exhausted performer, smiling through contradiction because it is easier than collapse.

Each piece in the series plays with the surreal tension between sincerity and illusion. The smile is painted, the surface bright—but the material speaks of heaviness, weight, crisis. This is the contradiction of contemporary living: a hyperreal theater in which myth has become product, where sincerity is displaced by performance. The sandbag—meant to shield against flood or violence—becomes a metaphor for emotional flooding and ideological fatigue. The myths we used to carry us are now burdening us, and yet we still hold them, smile painted on.

By situating denial as a ritual, Head in the Sand suggests that myth is no longer communal transcendence, but personal maintenance. These sandbags are not shields against a collective unknown—they are props we hold up to keep going. And just as Campbell proposed that myth evolves with culture, this series implies that the myths of late capitalism have collapsed inward. They are no longer cosmic, but domestic; not sacred, but functional—stories to make sense of the unbearable ordinary.

The question becomes not what we believe, but what we continue to perform out of fear of what would happen if we stopped. The works do not offer judgment or cynicism—they offer recognition. The smile, after all, is not false—it is exhausted. It is a learned survival gesture in a world where emotional honesty is disincentivized, where hope is outsourced to aesthetic, and where sandbags—both literal and metaphorical—are stacked high against the tide of meaninglessness.