PROJECTS
Night of the Living Dread (2026)
Digital Graphic Art
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Original Film Poster Artwork
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DREAD
Digital Graphic Art | 2026
Conceptual Background
Created as a digital graphic reinterpretation of the iconic poster art for George A. Romero’s 1968 cinema landmark, Night of the Living Dead, this work shifts the focus from fictional horror to historical trauma. Taking direct inspiration from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the piece subverts classic horror marketing to examine how hatred functions as an oppressive, ambient force. By preserving the exact visual architecture, color palette, and signature flourishes of the original poster, Skye Bailey bridges genre cinema with historical commentary, recontextualizing the concept of the "living dead" into the enduring legacy of racial violence and systemic destruction.
Artwork Synopsis
Night of the Living Dread meticulously recreates the high-contrast aesthetic of classic film iconography while fundamentally altering its core symbolism. Dominating the top of the canvas is a dense, fiery horizon where crimson hues bleed into dark, suffocating fog, faithfully mirroring the brooding tension of the original composition. Beneath this sky, the silhouetted horde rising from the horizon is transformed: rather than traditional zombie figures, each silhouette is constructed from vertical, stylized lettering spelling the word "HATE."
Replacing the physical monster with the abstract force of hatred, the artwork reframes the source material's threat. The bold, distressed typography of the title and the precision of the lower text section anchor the piece in classic cinematic language, while a faithful recreation of the original lower signature completes the visual dialogue. Night of the Living Dread serves as a graphic confrontation with historical cruelty, transforming a pop-culture horror staple into a stark memorial on the nature of destruction, prejudice, and memory.
HAUNTED PORTRAIT
Acrylic on Canvas | 12" x 16" | 2026
Conceptual Background
Created during A Day of Belonging, hosted by Mission Belonging and Strathmore, this acrylic on canvas piece emerged from a deliberate departure from the session's structured tutorial. While the guided exercise encouraged a reimagining of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night using a pink, red, and black palette, Skye Bailey chose to abandon the step-by-step instructions in favor of pure, uninterrupted intuition.
Rejecting pre-planned composition, Bailey allowed the brush to move continuously across the canvas, resulting in a stark, desolate visual landscape. Stripping the palette down to high-contrast yellow, deep black, and vivid red, the painting translates the artist’s established moving-image aesthetic into a raw, physical medium. The work stands as a testament to process over instruction, where spontaneous execution reveals deep personal truth.
Artwork Synopsis
Dominating the center is a large, minimalist black structure: a house rendered with subtle, uncanny human characteristics. Two square windows sit in place of eyes beneath arched brow-like structures, with a simple central form marking a nose. From the eye-windows, thick streams of crimson paint drip downward, merging into a heavy pool of bold red spanning the base of the canvas, resembling liquid that has steadily overflowed from within the walls.
While haunted houses traditionally signify horror, fear, and malevolence, this painting reinterprets the archetype. Here, the house is not a source of terror, but a victim of projection. It is haunted by the weight of external misinterpretation, false assumptions, and unearned judgment. The weeping blood serves as a visual metaphor for emotional exhaustion caused by being continually misread by the outside world.
For Bailey, the piece serves as a metaphorical self-portrait.
ZOMBIE CARRIE
Carved Wood & Mixed Media Puppet | 2026
Project Overview
Created during the New England Puppet Arts Wooden Puppet Lab & Residency at MASS MoCA in the Berkshires, Zombie Carrie marks my very first experience with wood carving and puppet fabrication. The week focused on traditional European style carving techniques to build classic wooden puppets. However, I decided to subvert the conventional idea of a traditional puppet by designing and carving a zombie, bringing my dark visual aesthetic into a three-dimensional physical medium for the first time.
NYU Film and TV Industry Essentials Certificate
Program Framework: Awarded by NYU Tisch and Rolling Stone via Yellowbrick upon completion of the full cinematic production curriculum.
Capstone Project: Features the final cut of the 1-minute silent moving image work, "Carrie On." Click here to view the project blueprints and film.
Course Progression: Includes early foundational coursework, beginning with the rhythmic visual study and video essay, "Weighted State," detailed immediately below.
WEIGHTED STATE
Mixed-Media Moving-Image Art | 01:00 | Silent | 2026
Conceptual Background
Weighted State is a one-minute, silent digital moving-image essay that interprets the life, philosophy, and formal vocabulary of photographer Gordon Parks. Drawing inspiration from Parks’ 1996 abstract masterpiece Balance and his 1990 memoir Voices in the Mirror, the work translates the psychological weight of systemic oppression and the pursuit of creative liberty into a formal study of geometric equilibrium.
In Balance, Parks moved away from literal documentary to construct symbolic landscapes using contrasting textures, light, and central anchors to explore the cosmic tension between opposing forces. Weighted State subverts this approach by treating historical text, vector geometry, and archival photography as distinct physical masses within a stark, high-contrast digital space. The film operates on a strict minimalist axis, utilizing a muted mercury palette against a solid black field to eliminate screen glare and introduce a soft, silver-toned sculptural weight to the typography. The structural constraints of the layout mirror the internal pressures Parks described during his transition from the racial friction of the United States to the creative sanctuary of Paris. Silence is deployed intentionally as an autonomous canvas, removing auditory distraction to focus the viewer entirely on the rhythmic, spatial cadence of form, texture, and time.
The title "Weighted State" directly reflects this dual tension. While "Weighted" addresses the literal gravity of the geometric compositions, "State" operates on two levels simultaneously. It addresses Parks' internal state of mind while navigating the social and political state of America, capturing the immense historical weight that those combined realities placed upon him.
Artwork Synopsis
The film opens on a black field with a minimalist title card: Weighted State. A mercury rectangular form descends, establishing a geometric frame that dissolves to reveal a low-opacity excerpt from Parks’ memoir regarding his pivotal years in Paris. A precise typographic wipe highlights his reflection on a lifetime spent rampaging against racial conditions and the sudden, transcendent peace of an environment free from institutional tension.
As the text recedes, the single word "time" remains, acting as the visual anchor for the film's central kinetic sequence. A mercury vector silhouette of a wristwatch, rendered with no fill and a sharp border, ascends from the lower register and centers itself over the word. A fixed shutter shape is revealed inside the dial via a blur effect; it features a small black space in its center where the word "time" momentarily remains visible before simultaneously fading away.
A dark gray trapezoid abruptly drops onto the left buckle, its graphic weight causing the entire watch composition to tilt downward. This gravitational tension is resolved when a mercury snowflake shape slowly descends onto the right side of the band, causing the watch to smoothly recenter and restore mathematical equilibrium to the axis.
With balance achieved, the rectangle and snowflake shapes fade. The watch drops slightly as a black-and-white photograph of Gordon Parks fades in, revealing the real watch face positioned exactly within that central shutter space where the text previously lived. The mercury watch outline dissolves completely, leaving the historical photo anchored in the frame. The work closes with a quiet biographical text card and a final list of compiled sources.
Community & Social Practice
THE ZOMBIE WELLNESS PROJECT (2025)
The Zombie Wellness Project is a mental health and wellness community experience that includes a socially-engaged exhibit and activities that integrate art, music, and dance.
WHAT HAUNTS YOU? (2024)
The art installation, "What Haunts You?" provides a space for the thing(s) that you want to say but can't when asked, "How are you?". Funded by The Big Idea Grant, "What Haunts You?" debuted at 2nd Saturday: Gratitude & Veteran Appreciation on 11/9/24 at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA.
Copyright © 2026 The Zombie Wellness Project - All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2026 Brooklyn B.A.R. Productions, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Carrie On: A Silent One-Minute Animation inspired by the 50th Anniversary of "Carrie"
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