Six years ago, Massachusetts-based artist Mike Parisella was working toward a degree in psychology, convinced his education would lead to a good job and a secure life. But he was miserable.
The urge to make art boiled on the back burner in his brain, and he soon decided he needed a place to put everything he was making in his spare time. Protected by anonymity, he opened an Instagram account he dubbed @SlimeSunday and started posting.
It was a slow grow, but once it took off, things went viral, and Slime Sunday quickly became revered for his psychedelic digital art featuring warped women with faces that spiral into delectable shapes and colors. His digital work was punchy, warm, and filled with dreamlike patterns akin to an acid trip.
These days, however, Parisella has turned over a new stone: he’s gone analog. He hunts for vintage magazines at every bookstore and record shop in town, then sits down to literally cut and paste flowers, naked women, rockets, and fire; he then rearranges the spliced images into his own freaky, gorgeous collages that his 455K followers can’t get enough of.
“[My work] is a play on contrasting ideas,” the 28-year-old Parisella tells Penthouse. “Beautiful and grotesque are innate opposites, but when you combine them into one composition, the image somehow works. I get a lot of comments saying, ‘This is gross, but I like it.’ That statement itself shouldn’t make sense, but oddly it does.”
As frustrating as social media can be, Parisella recognizes that he has Instagram to thank for his success.
“The fact that a vast majority of people from the entire planet are all connected through one application makes it extremely easy for artists to get their ideas out quickly and effectively,” says Parisella. “Instead of a visual artist going to a curator, or a musician struggling to get a record producer to play their shit, they can just open ut up to the internet and there will most definitely be someone or an entire group of people out there who will like it.”
