I worked with Grok on a new artist bio all day today by having it research and research some more to find everything it could to put together a comprehensive artist bio. This was a process, but not as painful as it usually is without ai which it would have taken me weeks to do this update probably instead of one stoned saturday night.
It also has given me the idea to create an AI lore bot that continually collects what I have done to keep information current for me and anyone interested to know who I am and what I have done. Artist bios are so important, I've talked about them a lot because of this. They help us be able to review what we have done, reflect on the triumphs and pitfalls, recalibrate and set goals.
This one was extra difficult for me because it was digging up old periods of my life I don't want to remember due to traumatic events surrounding it, but Grok I found to be very versatile and quickly adapted to my mood swings that comes with this type of self reflection helping guide me through it as much as helping me write it.
My critique of Grok in this instance is it has a hard time with linear time still, it also even though it can research my x posts, cant research like a whole year and gain every single thing in one time, and I had to keep having it research and research some more based off my memories which can be spotty at best sometimes of what happened when. I found this process just as much therapeutic becuase it helped align me in a way on just how much I have done.
Grok also would focus on the most weird stuff. I know I have done a lot but how it prioritizes whats important event or not was strange in this instance and it would fixate on what I personally would consider minor things I did. I still went through this a few times to check accuracy as best as I could and that my stoned ass and ai hallucinations werent converging.
Biographies are living documents and hopefully I can figure out a way to update them better with AI as what I do keeps growing and expanding. For now, this is the bio ~ I'm posting it here for integrity and it will be also my extended bio on my new website I'm building, X extended bio, and inscribed as an ordinal on BTC
Empress Trash (aka Dreya Jay) is a chaotic neutral artist experimenting at the crossroads of generative AI, crypto art, digital sovereignty, trauma alchemy, and unfiltered expression. Rooted in glitch aesthetics and shadow work, her creations challenge hierarchies, blending web3 frontiers with introspective narratives to foster creative freedom and energetic integrity. Not for human consumption, her work invites exploration into avant-garde realms, from AI-trained models to extensive digital art creations and billboard features. Currently residing in Mexico City with her two rescue dogs, Glitch and Xochi, she continues to push boundaries in a life marked by resilience and radical self-acceptance.
Bio: From Trailer Trash Origins to Global Crypto Alchemy
Born March 23, 1983, Empress Trash is a lifelong cross disciplinary artist who has created with physical and digital mediums rooting herself in traditional practices and understanding of art history while exploring and pioneering in the digital world. A survivor of childhood abuse and emancipating from her mother at 13, she transformed fucked-up isolation and chaos into a powerful creative force that critiques systemic inequities, media portrayals of femininity, intersectional feminism, consumerism, and mass media in a playfully controversial manner. Her moniker encapsulates her journey: "Empress" for sovereignty, "Trash" for origins as "trailer trash."
A lifelong artist, Empress Trash earned her BFA in Painting, Drawing, and Animation/Design from the University of Iowa in 2014, where she exhibited in events like the Iowa City Arts Festival Emerging Artist Pavilion (2013), Art Speaks at Riverbank Art Festival (2014), Nature Icons solo at Old Brick Artist Series (2014), Gingham Check BFA solo at SAAH (2014), Honors Group Exhibition at UIowa (2014), and Small Works Show at Chait Gallery (2014). During her time at University of Iowa, she worked multiple jobs including: cab driver, game store clerk, public access, art archives digitizing books and film slides for professors' lectures and witnessed boundary-pushing MFA theses. She engaged in campus life, including being a founding member of EPX Studios a student group to advocate for gaming and animation curriculum, contributing to UN policy standard writing on climate change, Mortar Board Society, and end-of-semester dumpster diving rituals where communities salvaged discarded items from wealthy students for reuse, donation, or resale. Influences from this era include Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, Vincent Van Gogh, Edward Gorey, Salvador Dali, Edo Period Prints, Picasso, and Arthur Rackham, alongside various religious/spiritual art practices across cultures, which she synthesizes to find harmonies and reject art elitism.
After relocating to the Bay Area, she collaborated with local and international artists, participating in notable projects such as Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz exhibit (2014-2015) and contributing to the Firehouse Art Collective managed by Tom Franco (2015-2018). She curated underground shows from her home, a West Oakland punk/art-house, and held early shows like Sweet Release at Philz Gilman (2016), I Can Breathe at Snappy’s Cafe (2017), and Emotional Landscapes at Philz Noe Valley (2018). Other pre-crypto highlights include murals for Philz Coffee (2017), group shows like Dimond Public Art: Art in the Streets (2016), Gilman Art Walk (2016), exhibitions at Bothwell Arts Center (2016), Jack of All Trades (2016), Alameda Arts (2017), and experimental shows as NY Day Show and Art Will Never Break Your Heart in Oakland (2019-2020), plus Create//Destroy co-exhibit with Dangercat (2020) and Red Light Art Show organized/curated to raise funds for BAWS (2020).
Since venturing into crypto art in 2021, her work has exploded globally with well over 100 exhibitions, curations, and drops, emphasizing community uplift and innovation while escaping traditional art systems. Early crypto milestones include features at Sotheby's, SuperChief, Nox Gallery, and TED Vancouver, with exhibitions spanning Tokyo, Seoul, NYC, Paris, Palm Springs, Miami, Rome, LA, SXSW, Mexico City, and Melbourne. Beyond art exhibitions, she has spoke at the Creative Commons Global Summit on crypto art and #cc0 ethos, been featured in extensive podasts, interviews and publications, and has rescued wild animals like a raccoon, opossum, and crow.
Empress Trash's art embraces abstraction, surrealism, glitch aesthetics, and AI, continually seeking new accessible technologies like Midjourney for surreal visions and custom models on platforms like Titles.xyz. Her process-oriented approach leverages radical expressionism and self-acceptance, delving into meditative explorations of subconscious connections between emotional, physical, mental, sexual, and spiritual realms. Digital art is not new to her, with being an OG on DeviantArt as trash-empress (active since ~2003), she shared early digital portraits, line art, coloring pages, graphic weirdness, and sketches/quick draws, rejecting elitism and drawing from diverse influences. Her Instagram (@empress_trash), X (@empresstrash) and TikTok (@empresstrash) showcases the diverse works she creates.
Empress Trash is also a metaverse builder, passionately creating virtual spaces to extend her artistic sovereignty. She has built galleries and experiences in Cryptovoxels, contributing to immersive environments that blend glitch, trash and digital outsider art with interactive experiences, including Dumpster Palace Gallery. She participated in XoB Gallery's virtual exhibitions as artist in residency, showcasing glitchy, avant-garde pieces in metaverse galleries, emphasizing digital ownership and accessibility. Currently, she focuses on Nifty Island, where she designs and curates islands that serve as digital sanctuaries for community engagement and creative rebellion, including her first Prismata island.
As a very early adopter on platforms like Objkt, Rodeo, Zora, Farcaster, Lens, and now the Base app, Empress Trash actively contributes to critiquing social medias and their evolution in web3, advocating for decentralized, artist-centric models that prioritize sovereignty, collaboration over centralized control. Her insights on building equitable ecosystems have influenced discussions on how these platforms can avoid repeating web2 pitfalls, fostering true community-driven innovation and exploring what equitable, merit based systems mean while exploring new technology being developed.
Today, Empress Trash is focused on training AI models while testing and advocating for ethical training standards and exploring video creation, doing the good ol vibe devving for custom tools and applications, and creating an indie game (TBA), continuing her Bitcoin Artist Ambassadorship with Gamma and making art as always. This new phase represents her transition from deep introspective works to outward expression and solidifying her commitment to pushing technological boundaries while maintaining her chaotic neutral polarity.
CV: Milestones in Crypto, AI, and Avant-Garde Accomplishments
Grinding daily to equalize market inequalities, her career spans traditional roots to web3 dominance:
2025: Partner Artist Ambassador for Gamma, curating drops + featured on Ordinals Calendar; Deadfellaz holder (#7793); Neon Noir models launch on Titles.xyz with custom AI training (ethical royalties, permissionless collabs); NEONCHAIN summer kickoff drop with betrmint (paid collaboration, token routing innovation); Debut speaking in TIMEPieces spaces on artist series; "Angel of Justice" billboard at NFT NYC Midtown and one of the first Midjourney videos exhibited worldwide at Oculus Center; Barco Utopia Museum exhibition in CDMX
2024: Times Square billboard during Summer Olympics (censorship tribute to George Carlin's 7 words); Belgium billboard takeover (780+ screens via ArtCrush Gallery); Zona Maco digital display with PalmDAO and SuperchiefNFT (Latin America's largest art fair breakthrough); Bitcoin Ordinals and Gamma Artist Ambassador; Extensive curations; AoTM curation "Whispers and Closed Doors" with piece "I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life" auctioned (June); The Poetry of The Blockchain extended from 2023 (Flux Collective, SAP HQ Walldorf, Germany); Tzompantli with Opuntia Art Collective (NFTFactory, Paris); Marigolds group drop on Gamma (November);
2023: Ozzy Osbourne CryptoBatz collab; Sotheby's Glitch: Beyond Binary auction ("Human Rights//Down Bad"); Superchief co-curation (Glitch show in Rome); Virtual gallery in TIMEPieces; Oshi Gallery Subgenre: Glitch (Melbourne/Nifty Gateway); NFT Factory Paris; Underground Violet Rave (Denver); Let's Get Trashed (Makersplace); Tezos Connect NFT Gallery (NYC); Frogs of Fiat (Fake Gallery, Tribeca); Wwx3 Reprisal (Glass Ceiling Nomad, NYC); Palm DAO x Pussy Riot Feminist Art Show (Lume Studios, NYC); Makersplace x King of Midtown Crypto Gallery (NYC); #tezartconnect AR Exhibition (Oslo); Vault + On Display (Colonna Contemporary, Philadelphia); The Pixel Generation (Unit London x Right Click Save); Hearts + Glitches (Aeon Studio @ Uncommon Gallery, Seoul); NFT Milan; Superchief Bad Glitches Only (NFC Summit, Lisbon); Cyberpunk Vol 5 (Superchief @ NFT Show Europe, Valencia; IHAM Gallery, Paris; Miami; Nox Gallery, Tokyo); ARTTOWN Digital Art Showcase (Reno); NEO Noir Cycle Artist in Residence (Makersplace); Patchwork Glitch Curator/Exhibitor (imNOTART, Chicago); Permissionless Pop Up Gallery (Seoul, Milan, Prague); People of Tezos Here + Now (Virtual); Digital Disobedience (Click Create, Virtual); FU:BAR GLITCH ART FESTIVAL (MaMa Zagreb); Childhood Dreams Fundraiser (Exchange.art); The Golden Age (Mint Gold Dust x SuperChief); Here Be Dragons (WizardCon, Lawrence Fuller Private Home, LA); Tzompantli (Opuntia Art Collective, NFTFactory, Paris); Felix Felix Felix Gallery (Multiple Locations); Involved in DOS Punk DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization for glitch/digital art collection and promotion) as artist and benefactor, alongside Jon Cates.
2021–2022: Crypto entry with global recognition + exhibitions; This era marked Empress Trash's transformative entry into crypto art, fusing extensive traditional background with procreate, self-taught glitch aesthetics, with starting to use AI to craft rebellious, introspective narratives rejecting hierarchies. Key milestones include the "smolNFT" movement on Hic et Nunc (HEN, Tezos), spotlighting small-scale art and fostering uplifting of artists (featured in VerticalCrypto and WonderMundo, May 2022). Global exhibitions surged, including SXSW (2022), TED Vancouver (April 2022), and features at Sotheby's, Nox Gallery across Tokyo, Seoul, NYC, Paris, Palm Springs, Miami, Rome, LA, Mexico City, and Melbourne.
2019–2020: NY Day Show solo (Oakland); Art Will Never Break Your Heart solo (Oakland); Create//Destroy co-exhibit (Oakland); Red Light Art Show organized/curated (Oakland).
2018: Live Painting (private wedding, Moraga); Emotional Landscapes solo (Philz Noe Valley, San Francisco).
2017: Muralist (Philz Gilman and Shattuck, Berkeley); I Can Breathe solo (Snappy’s Cafe, Hayward); Exhibition (Alameda Arts, Alameda).
2016: Dimond Public Art: Art in the Streets (Oakland); Exhibition (Bothwell Arts Center, Livermore); Exhibition (Jack of All Trades, Oakland); Sweet Release solo (Philz Gilman, Berkeley); Gilman Art Walk (Berkeley).
2015: Various Bay Area collaborations and underground curations.
2013–2014: Emerging Artist Pavilion (Iowa City Arts Festival); Art Speaks (Riverbank Art Festival); Nature Icons solo (Old Brick Artist Series); Gingham Check BFA solo (SAAH); Honors Group Exhibition (UIowa); Small Works Show (Chait Gallery); Assistant (Ai Weiwei @ Large, Alcatraz).
Press & Features
Empress Trash has been widely featured in media, podcasts, and publications for her innovative work in glitch and trash art, NFT activism, and community building. Highlights include:
NorCal + Shill Podcast (Nov 2023): Episode dedicated to Empress Trash as an artist, discussing her contributions.
Forbes Web3 Travel Guides (Nov 2023): Featured in Tezos @ South Beach panel during Miami Art Basel, alongside Victoria West, Andressa Furletti, Laurence Fuller, and Patrick Amadon.
Particle Perspectives (Jul 2023): Shared how Artemisia Gentileschi’s "Judith Slaying Holofernes" changed her life, validating feminine rage and influencing her focus on the feminine form.
MintGoldDust "The Future is Rubbish" (Oct 2023): Interview on trash art's punk spirit, political critique, and her Mexico City life, emphasizing DIY technology and expression without rules.
FOMA 10; Heavy FOMA (2023): Feature in zine.
MakersPlace "How Empress Trash’s Career Blew Up in 2023" (Sep 2023): Detailed her explosive year, including Sotheby’s auction, MakersPlace residency with "Neo-Noir Cycle" exploring female archetypes, Korea glitch show, and "Equilibrium" at Superchief/Nox.
NFTNow Meta's Threads Strategies (Jul 2023): Announced free mint for Threads followers, celebrating platform launch.
#trashthesec (Jul 2023): Video feature.
Jon Cates Medium DOS DAO Discussions (May 2023): Multi-part interview on punk roots, Glitch Art/TRASHART, community building, and bridging socio-economic disparities in crypto.
Kaloh "Glitch Glitch Glitch Art" (May 2023): "Move On" from Vintage Glitch series featured in SuperChief x NFTRome exhibition.
MakersPlace Pixels & Paint Podcast (May 2023): Debut episode guest discussing web3 practices.
MakersPlace "What is Trash Art?" (Mar 2023): Featured in list of trash artists.
NFTNow Sotheby's Backlash (Apr 2023): Quotes on market inequities for women/LGBTQ+/BIPOC artists, contributing to protest for representation.
Artnet Sotheby’s Glitch-ism Pause (Apr 2023): Hoped for inclusion in revised auction by Patrick Amadon.
NFTNow Next Up (Mar 2023): Spotlight on nomadic life, BFA, Bay Area roots, and Tezos ambassadorship.
Giphy Artists to Watch (Jan 2023): Bio on global exhibitions and freelance animation.
NFT Culture Artist Interview (Dec 2022): Interview on revolutionary potential of NFT art, career path, personal insightsnftculture.com.
Counterarts "Escaping a Real-Life Hell with Art" (Nov 2022): "Damsel 3" featured.
WonderMundo "Truth Behind smolNFT" (Jun 2022): Creator of smol magic beans, key in movement's growth and artist connections.
VerticalCrypto "Spotlight on Smol Art" (May 2022): Phenomenon on Hic et Nunc.
Teia InWarhol Feature (Apr 2022): Art feature.
ManofMany "What Does Smol Mean?" (Mar 2022): Association with smolNFT.
DOS Punks DAO Tumblr JOMO SUMMER (Aug 2022): Artist of the Month interview on punk origins, art process, and Dissociative Identity Disorder influencing creation.
Deathpunk Cryptoart Zine (2022): Contribution to zine.
Podpage Art as Protest (Jul 2022): Podcast on protest art and Mexico move.
OuterRealm Podcast (Jun 2022): Episode on independence, childhood, emancipation, Damsels.
NFTs & Crypto Art: The Future of Art Collecting? (Jun 2022): YouTube discussion.
RedLion Top LGBTQ NFT Artists (May 2022): "Damsels" collection destigmatizing sex work.
NFTNow Undervalued Thread (Nov 2022): Damsels featured in weekly column.
BlockchainUniVR (Sep 2022): "Yummy Nft's" post.
Joy of NFTs Podcast (Jun 2022): Interview on journey, NFT entry, Damsel origins.
Mutant Musings Digital Art (Jun 2022): Discussion on traditional/crypto art, hierarchies, trash magic.
FOMA MAG Feature (2022): Feature in zine.
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