Orpheus 5 from “Bus Vogue: The Glow Series”

Illustration of a character named Orpheus 5 for a written and multimedia work, “Bus Vogue: the Glow Series." This multimedia work is in collaboration with Mortezaie’s other long-time collaborator and mentor, Guita Tahmassebi. Tahmassebi is a writer and filmmaker, with a previous focus on Movement and Improv in theater and dance, living in Los Angeles. Through theater, video, fashion, animation, and writing, “Bus Vogue” explores the spirituality of the self with triumphant capitalism and its pillars: “Commercialization,” “Commodification,” “Wellness,” and “Branding,” while nature and Earth burn to death. The dystopian manga illustration depicts a 21st century Dionysian, a gay “illegal alien” with the online username “Orpheus 5.” He lives at the edge of the world at its end, in the city of Holy-Wood™. Orpheus 5 rides the bus to the concrete mall to work at Gloomingdale's by day, so that he can poetically fiend for crack and sex at night in search of his “White Knight,” searching through his online portal to the circuitry of the stars for his elite demi-God, the “Platinum Knight.”