Q&A with Roy Uptain
Roy Uptain’s goal is to create embodied experiences with paintings, drawings, and installations that explore the ideologies and unseen forces that shape public thought, dialogue, and behavior. By committing to understanding our historical moment and bearing witness to each other’s lives, we claim our ability to imagine better futures together.
Briefly describe your thesis project. What themes are you exploring, and in what mediums/with what materials?
My work, “Edgelord Ethnography,” is a multimedia installation that reconstructs domestic spaces modeled after real images from online forums like the Reddit community r/malelivingspaces. There, anonymity, irony, and toxic masculinity merge into a distinctive visual and psychological aesthetic. By restaging these interiors using cheap, modular materials — milk crates, kettlebells, gamer chairs, flags, LED lights — I explore how internet subcultures, especially 4chan-adjacent edgelord communities, bleed into physical space. The project traces how digital personas built on provocation, nihilism, and taboo begin to materialize in the offline world as mood, affect, and architecture. At its core, “Edgelord Ethnography” asks: What happens when the meme becomes the mirror? What does it mean when ideology is no longer something we consume, but something we live inside?
What do you hope someone feels when they experience your work?
I want them to feel unsettled, disturbed, but still curious. The work plays with contradictions and collapse — it maps out a space where what is darkly humorous and what is deadly serious mingle. There’s a tension between distance and complicity, between aesthetic attraction and ideological repulsion. I want people to recognize that the line between irony and belief has collapsed — and that the environments we inhabit are shaped by these collapse zones.
Roy Uptain in his studio. (Photo: Caitlin Custer)
What has been surprising as you’ve worked on this project?
What surprised me most is how difficult it is to maintain critical and artistic distance while immersed in the aesthetics of digital extremism. Studying edgelord subcultures, surveillance erotics, and military propaganda pulled me into spaces that are both repulsive and compelling — and I had to constantly reflect on my own positionality as both a former propagandist and an artist. It’s a reminder that ideology doesn’t just shape our external environments; it shapes our emotional and embodied responses.
How does your research interact with this project?
My research draws from media theory, masculinities studies, military doctrine, post-internet art, and digital ethnography. I treat social media platforms, government white papers, and meme culture as both archives and zones of ideological conflict. This research fuels my material choices and conceptual frameworks — I’m constantly asking how seemingly banal visuals (a Ring ad, a Reddit post, a police bodycam) can be read as sites of ideological warfare.
What was your path to becoming an artist like?
I trained as a mass communications specialist for the U.S. Army, which immersed me in the mechanics of messaging, framing, and influence. After leaving the military, I turned to art as a way to investigate and unmake the systems I had once helped maintain. My path has been less about arriving at art and more about rerouting it — using it to trace the affective, political, and psychic debris left behind by institutions of power.
Are there any faculty, courses, making spaces, or other WashU resources that have had a big impact on you?
Working closely with mentors like Tiffany Calvert and Ila Sheren helped me develop a practice that is both theoretically rigorous and materially experimental. The faculty pushed me to complicate my visual language while grounding my ideas in deep research. Courses in media theory and critique sharpened my thinking, while access to flexible installation space allowed me to test unconventional formats that blur the line between academic research and affective experience.
