Empress Trash

Empress Trash, who works under the name Drea Jay, is a visual artist, curator and community builder who came into crypto art in March 2021 and became one of the loudest voices of the Trash Art movement. Before crypto art she worked in the traditional art world, and she left an art appraisal job to go full time into NFTs. Her own account of her early years is blunt: severe abuse at home, childhood prostitution, and legal emancipation at thirteen. She turns that history into the material of the work rather than hiding it, and she has been open about a moment when her own ego got ahead of her and she pulled back to watch the scene instead of chasing it. She describes herself as a hybrid artist, builder and curator working in pigment, glitch, motion, AI and metaverse debris, and she releases a lot of her output as CC0. She has lived and worked nomadically, including a stretch in Mexico City, and she travels with her rottweiler, Glitch. She co-founded and co-hosts community projects including Fam Jam, the Smol Movement, Collectors Crew and the weekly Trash {Art} Talk spaces, and she donates ten percent of proceeds from her Damsels collection to Bay Area Workers Support, a peer led organization for sex workers. In April 2023 Sotheby's included her in Glitch: Beyond Binary, the house's first dedicated glitch art sale.

She works across glitch, datamosh, collage, painting and generative AI, often layering hand made imagery with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion output and then running the result through moshing tools. Recurring bodies of work include Damsels, a slow release collection about inclusion and social justice, the Vintage Glitch series, and a run of AI collage portraits of historical women. She mints across Tezos and Ethereum and is an early adopter on newer venues, and she curates and collects alongside making her own work.

• Damsels, her long running slow release collection benefiting Bay Area Workers Support
• Human Rights//Down Bad, selected for Sotheby's Glitch: Beyond Binary in 2023
• A leading voice of the Trash Art movement
• Vintage Glitch series of AI collage and glitch works
• Co-host of the Trash {Art} Talk and Collectors Crew spaces
• Community projects Fam Jam, Smol Movement and Collectors Crew

On the show