17 Nov 2023/67 min/Empress Trash
MLow X Empress Trash
A never published hour with Empress Trash: from an Oakland trash heap to Sotheby's, the ego moment that almost ended her crypto art career, and a complete map of her glitch and AI process.
This episode never aired, which makes it the archive's buried treasure: the most unvarnished biography in the corpus. Empress Trash tells her life straight. She left home at thirteen, dropped out after private school, partied through her twenties, earned a BFA in painting, drawing and design in her late twenties, then moved to California, where she worked as an art sales intern, assembled Lego portraits of prisoners of conscience for the Ai Weiwei show on Alcatraz, joined Tom Franco's Firehouse Art Collective, and ran punk shows and experimental performance nights out of her rented West Oakland house until Covid ended it. An Oakland mutual aid fund for artists carried her through, which is why she champions mutual aid in crypto art now.
The pivot came from misery: a glorified warehouse job appraising and authenticating art, a coworker whose boyfriend mentioned NFTs, and one weekend of research that ended in hot damn, this is what I want to do. She minted in February 2021, was ignored for weeks, got mad, caught herself having an ego moment, and stepped back to watch how the space worked instead. Her first sale landed two days before her birthday; she quit the appraisal job that May knowing the market would likely turn, and by this recording had been full time for two and a half years with work exhibited on every continent except Antarctica, including Sotheby's.
The rest is craft and conviction. The name Empress Trash, born from making installations out of trash dumped off the freeway into her Oakland neighborhood and from refusing to wait for anyone's validation. Trash art as the digital heir of every rebellious movement since industrialization. A full tour of her toolchain, from Procreate and After Effects through Midjourney into a locally installed Stable Diffusion, ending in Photomosh as deliberate homage to ROBNESS. And a closing run of advice for new artists that is the most quotable stretch of the whole archive: stop chasing collectors, learn to talk about your art, and do not change it for anyone but yourself.
What this episode teaches
- Catch the ego moment
After minting in February 2021 she was ignored for weeks and got mad. Then she caught herself: I can't get mad. She stepped back, watched how people in the space actually operated, refocused, and sold her first piece two days before her birthday. Anger at being ignored is a signal to study, not to post.
- Artists are not hourly workers
Her answer to the low effort AI debate: time spent is not value. Conceptualizing is working, dreaming is working, staring into space is working, and some of her best pieces take half an hour to execute because the thinking took weeks. A painting can take forever and still be bad.
- Once someone calls it art, the debate is over
Her conviction on raw AI output: as long as one person in the world says something is art, nobody can take that away, and it does not even have to be the creator. You can debate whether it is good; debating whether it is art is wasted energy.
- Accessible tools can carry serious work
She deliberately makes hyper complicated work in Photomosh, the app dismissed as low effort, partly as homage to ROBNESS and partly as thesis: you do not need expensive complicated software to make elaborate art. Her proof: work made with it was shown at Sotheby's.
- Stop chasing collectors, connect with artists
Her core advice for newcomers: the best opportunities come from friendships with other artists, especially established ones, because friends naturally include each other. Chasing collector attention is understandable, but artist connections are what sustain you mentally and professionally.
- Learn to talk about your art
Every creative field involves self promotion: musicians do talk shows, actors do interviews. She is an introvert who taught herself spaces and podcasts by doing them, and her verdict for artists who complain is blunt: suck it up buttercup, you have to learn to talk about your art no matter who you are.
- Do not change your art for anyone but yourself
Anyone telling you that you must make work a certain way to sell is an immediate red flag; each person finds success their own way. Make art that makes you happy, and the energy in it attracts people naturally.
- Build a language with the AI
Her prompting method is exploratory: free write whatever weird stuff is in her head, then append aesthetics, art history styles, emotive words and time periods (vintage glitch watercolor collage from magazines of an era). Over time this builds a private vocabulary with the model, so when she wants a specific aesthetic she knows what words produce it.
- Title yourself
The Empress in her name is a claim: she does not need anyone to validate her power or autonomy, she can grant herself the title. Paired with trash, the class label she could never escape, the two halves balance into the whole persona.
- Leverage your painting hand into a model
Her next step is training LoRAs (via a local Stable Diffusion with Automatic1111, a few hundred images) on her pre crypto oil paintings and her Procreate work, so the AI carries her actual style, then feeding outputs back as sketches for physical paintings. The loop runs both directions.
The conversation, topic by topic
The life story
Left home at 13, private school, dropped out, BFA in painting, drawing and design in her late twenties, then California: art sales intern, assembling Lego portraits of prisoners of conscience for the Ai Weiwei exhibition on Alcatraz, the Firehouse Art Collective run by Tom Franco, and running fundraisers, art shows, punk shows and experimental performance out of her rented West Oakland house.
Covid, mutual aid and the warehouse job
Covid ended the Oakland shows; a mutual aid fund for artists kept her afloat, which is why she talks about mutual aid in the space now. Her degree got her a job appraising and authenticating art that she calls an awful glorified warehouse job, and a coworker's boyfriend in crypto asked one question that changed everything: have you heard of NFTs?
February 2021 and the ego moment
She researched NFTs over a weekend, minted quickly because she already had finished work, and was ignored for weeks. She got mad, recognized the ego moment, stepped back to watch people, and sold her first piece on chain two days before her birthday. That May she quit her job despite knowing the market would likely tank, on faith in the space. Two and a half years later she has exhibited on every continent except Antarctica, with work in TED Talks and Sotheby's.
What the work is about
Understanding herself as a woman, critiquing consumerism and feminine identity in media, and processing trauma. She has to make art to manage her mental health, which is why people call her insanely prolific. Healing and self work run under everything.
Where the name comes from
She grew up trailer trash in the Minnesota woods and felt the class ceiling even in private art school. Living at the base of the Bay Bridge in Oakland, where people dumped trash off the freeway into her neighborhood, she picked through it and made installations. Empress Trash formed there: elevating trash while claiming a title no one else would grant her.
Trash art and its lineage
She is friends with ROBNESS and has planned trash events with him and Max Capacity, but stresses she was Empress Trash before entering the space. Trash art, to her, is the amalgamation of every rebellious art movement since industrialization, Dada included, hyper amplified in digital form on the blockchain. There is no manifesto, each artist defines it for themselves, and she thinks disconnecting it from art history is a disservice.
Korea and glitch
Her work showed in Korea though she could not afford to attend. She studied Korean and Japanese in undergrad, once eyeing a PhD in Asian art history, and argues glitch art has a root in Korea: the divided country's collective longing for wholeness feeds a disruption aesthetic, amplified by living in one of the most technologically integrated societies on earth.
Miami Basel plans
She organized early, three months out, and now everyone is contacting her last minute. Confirmed: art in a charity show, art at the Tezos event, and a panel on December 6 (she names, roughly, Patrick Amadon and Lawrence Fuller as likely co-panelists, with caveats), plus an event run by NorCal and friends. She goes for crypto art and artist friends, not PFP parties: the DJ sets can stay on Twitter.
Abstraction learned from abuse
Asked about Easter eggs, she explains that she learned to abstract meaning as a child in an abusive situation where speaking directly got her in trouble. As an adult she has studied subconscious mechanisms, color theory and propaganda, and builds pieces that disrupt viewers subliminally: a surface layer, then depth that only unpacks with time. She will tell a buyer what a special piece really means.
Recurring symbols and the vintage glitch thesis
Eyes and mouths recur (she literally sees eyes when she closes hers), plus the feminine form and vintage technology. Her vintage style glitches specifically target early mass media and consumerism, the 1940s through 60s golden age of advertising with roots back to the 1910s, disrupting the narrative that there is one way to be a woman.
The toolchain
After Effects, TouchDesigner, DaVinci, and Procreate for her illustrative style, though repetitive strain in her shoulder and arm has forced a drawing break since January. She is counting the days to Procreate Dreams (five days away at recording) and is postponing a solo show offer from a gallery in Germany so she can build the show inside it.
AI as glitch, and the pipeline
She argues AI art is inherently glitch art right now: a disruptive technology whose outputs are beautifully messed up. Her pipeline: generate base imagery in Midjourney (whose language she speaks best), edit and vary frames in a locally installed Stable Diffusion, layer them into GIFs, then push through Photomosh; Deforum handles animation. The Photomosh choice honors ROBNESS's path while remaining her own story, and the fact that Sotheby's showed work made in a low effort app delights her.
Prompting craft and LoRA ambitions
She shares real prompts: disruptive feminist art for a billboard, late stage capitalism, curvy figures with tattoos, religious icons, vintage glitch watercolor collage, honed over two or three days. She free writes, mixes art history periods, and uses emotive words. Next she wants LoRAs trained on her pre crypto paintings, having finally plugged in the old hard drive with its bad memories. MLow trades his own ambition: a model trained on his archive of over 100,000 photographs.
Advice for new artists
Find artists you like and befriend them rather than chasing collectors; ignore the noise, because money does not equal knowing what you are talking about; put yourself out there and learn to speak about your work, since self promotion is core to every creative field; and never change your art for anyone but yourself. The space exists to give power back to artists.
In their words
“I can't get mad. And I just stepped back and watched people.”
Empress Trash“I don't need to wait for other people to validate me and my power and my autonomy. I can just give myself that title.”
Empress Trash“Once someone says it's art, the debate is over.”
Empress Trash“We're not hourly workers. Conceptualizing things is working. Dreaming is working.”
Empress Trash“Stop chasing collectors and connect with other artists.”
Empress Trash“Suck it up buttercup. You have to learn to talk about your art no matter who you are.”
Empress TrashCite this conversation
Empress Trash in conversation with MLow, "MLow X Empress Trash," The MLow Show, unaired recording, 17 Nov 2023. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-11-17-mlow-x-empress-trash.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.