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Seize the Screens: Empress Trash from Mexico City to Montreal

From an immersive comet in Mexico City to curating a team at RGBMTL in Montreal, Empress Trash closes out a busy 2026 with a work in the Francisco Carolinum Linz collection.

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EMPRESS TRASH chose a name that means two things at once, and she means both. "Empress" stands for sovereignty, claimed after she emancipated herself from her mother at 13. "Trash" is for where she came from, trailer trash, and for an aesthetic she has never sanded down. She earned a BFA in Painting, Drawing, and Animation/Design at the University of Iowa in 2014, spent years in the Bay Area art underground, and moved into crypto art in 2021. She now lives and works in Mexico City.

The practice runs on collision. Hand painting, Procreate animation, glitch processing, and generative AI get layered until the seams show. In April 2023, Sotheby's included her Human Rights//Down Bad in Glitch: Beyond Binary: an animated collage built from a photograph of three Pussy Riot members in chains, pushed through AI, Photomosh, and After Effects.

Mexico City is both home base and testing ground. In May 2025, Will You Trust Her? was shown in Transmuta at Barco Utopía. That fall she joined the first cohort of Sincretismo Digital, the Wait & Hope Foundation's residency anchored in the city. Her project, The Comet, is a short film and music video made with Midjourney, Grok, MoshPro, and Suno. It reads history's fear of comets, from 1066 to the Black Death, as a mirror for human division. After a final presentation on November 30, it returned as an audio-reactive immersive installation during the Un Sueño Digital festival, December 13 to 16, 2025.

In Montreal, she showed up as a curator. RGBMTL, the artist collective behind an annual, collectively curated show of online and blockchain artists, held its fifth edition on August 28 and 29, 2026, at 1481 rue Ottawa. The model is horizontal. Twenty-five to thirty artist-curators each bring a small team, and every artist gets one minute on screen across wall projections, a CRT wall, and a tall portrait "monolith." In her first year in the role, Empress Trash showed work from her Voluptechne series and brought in nine artists: animoscillator, anzomez, guruguruhyena, Iteration__, lesCogumelos, LuisBetx9, ojovivoMotion, ResetNft, and WAAMBAT.

RGBMTL also took part in MUTEK's Village Numérique this year at Esplanade Tranquille. For that installation she made two Alice in Wonderland pieces, Cheshire and Down the Rabbit Hole, both minted on SuperRare. For the collective's Objkt fundraiser, which covers production and pays the curating artists, she minted Seize the Screens on Tezos: an edition of 13 inspired by Apple's 1984 Super Bowl ad. She couldn't travel, so she built a satellite of the show in Decentraland, open at rgbmtl.dcl.eth.

Voluptechne sets the terms for the recent work. Its manifesto, minted on Objkt in April 2026, calls generative AI "the new classical instrument of creation" and defines the movement as "sovereign pleasure as the active transcendence of human suffering."

Then came the museum. Wen Moon #850 has entered the permanent collection of the Francisco Carolinum Linz, and on September 9 it went on view in Collection Francisco Carolinum: 3 Blockchains, one Collection, curated by Julia Staudach and running through February 7, 2027.

The crown is earned. The trash stays in the work.

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