Think for a second about what comes to mind when you hear “soda.” Perhaps fizzy, saccharine, and bright? Then consider the connotations of the word “sour.” Maybe it evokes the zing of a lemon, tanginess, or something sharper. This is the relationship that forms the basis of Sour Soda Studio, a project built upon two decades of illustration experience with a playful and slightly unsettling view of some of the most pressing issues of the Anthropocene.
“It didn’t come from a change of direction, or from a manifesto,” says the artist, who prefers to remain unnamed. “It came from something simpler: the need to say different things with a different voice.” In these vibrant, often absurd works with titles like “Plastic Wind” and “The Siren’s Catch,” humans’ control over their surroundings is just a fantasy. Clouds mimic the shapes of trees, tiny figures hold onto botanicals floating inside of bubbles, and totally oblivious festival-goers ignore a polar bear’s plight on a shrinking chunk of ice even as it mauls one of them to death.
Sour Soda Studio’s approach is like a bit of a visual side-eye, nodding with an air of dark humor to the anxieties and societal disconnect around the climate crisis and humanity’s role in the balance of nature. A lumberjack whacks at a tree that’s already on fire. A crocodile disappears into the brush with all but a pool cleaner’s arm. And mermaids are fished from the sea like tuna and later canned in attractive packaging. Aren’t sirens known for enticing humans into the depths?
The artist began by tinkering with ideas on paper, then rendering vectors on an iPad. Over time, what he describes as a “visual alphabet” began to emerge that consisted of simple forms and colors and a world of transitional landscapes and suspended figures, animals, and plants. They’re all “images that can be poetic, decorative, narrative, or something harder to name,” he says. “Many of them touch on nature, ecosystems, consumption, and the relationship between people and the world they live in.”
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