OSHA-CORE by Starholder is a high-concept visual collection disguised as workplace signage, blending safety aesthetics with the weight of philosophical inquiry. Across its vivid, glitch-streaked panels, viewers are confronted not with falling objects or wet floors, but with semiotic traps, broken systems, deferred futures, and the burden of selfhood. The collection’s central conceit is simple and brilliant: if the world is a site of ongoing risk, it is not the body alone that needs protection, but also the mind, the spirit, the story. What if the most dangerous hazards were existential?

Each sign delivers its message in a compressed syntax that mimics the tone of public safety directives—bold fonts, schematic figures, hazard colors. But the danger here is metaphysical. A sign might warn: YOU ARE BEING MISREAD BY THE SYSTEM YOU ARE OPTIMIZING, or SYMBOLS DO NOT SAVE YOU. These are not instructions to avoid harm, but alarms exposing how deeply harm is built into our symbolic, cognitive, and economic environments. Whether addressing transhumanism as secular rapture, the commodification of critique, or the burnout of identity uptime, OSHA-CORE creates moments of instant recognition. The viewer laughs, then flinches.

Philosophical lineages run beneath each piece like buried power cables. The series pulls from Arendt, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Ehrenreich, Deleuze, Morton, and Weil, but not as citations—it channels their force. What makes OSHA-CORE so potent is that it doesn’t explain or argue. It signs. It posts. It alerts. And in doing so, it reinserts critical theory back into the realm of collective life. The texts are sharp enough to cut through abstraction and strange enough to resist becoming mere aesthetic.

But it’s not all critique. OSHA-CORE also offers glimpses of affirmation. Signs like STATE OF GRACE DETECTED or THE VITA ACTIVA IS STILL POSSIBLE shift the tone toward redemptive presence and shared action. These pieces remind us that repair is not just possible, but underway—when we refuse symbolic substitution, when we speak and act in the world as it is. Even EMBRACE THE IMMANENT carries an undertone of sacred realism: a theology without transcendence, a politics without illusion.

In a time of endless abstraction and ambient collapse, OSHA-CORE invites us to reread the signs—not on the wall, but in the structure of reality itself. It’s a user’s manual for navigating late subjectivity with clarity, irony, and refusal. At once warning and witness, joke and judgment, this collection doesn’t just want to make you think. It wants to keep you from falling through the floor.

View the collection here.