Behind The Artworks: Cerebral Hemorrhage - Exempting Reality (2024)

The album cover for the re-issue of “Exempting Reality” is a close-up image of a small section of a much larger sculpture produced in 1917 by French artist Auguste Rodin. The sculpture, titled “The Gates of Hell,” is that of a large doorway with a series of smaller human figures embedded into it who are engaged in nightmarish scenes described in Dante Alighieri’s famous epic poem “Inferno”. We chose that image as the album cover because it fits perfectly with the theme of the title track “Exempting Reality”. The song tells a surreal, dark tale about the journey of entering an altered psychological state in which the mind is consumed by the worthlessness, futility, and pain of human existence. The cover image connects with that really well because it’s a microcosm of a larger sculpture of a gateway to another reality of a twisted, macabre nature. Secondly, that specific close-up image captures the song well in that it portrays a heavily grim, otherworldly scene of human figures sinking into some sort of amorphous pool of consuming darkness. Not only that, but using that image as the cover allows for continuity between the album’s new and old visual designs. The original album cover was a surreal image of a gateway, capturing the gateway-to-another-reality theme of the title track, which the new cover also connects with since it’s part of a larger sculpture of a doorway to a hellish, other reality. Not to mention of course, an image of that same part of the sculpture was used on the back of the CD design for the original release of “Exempting Reality”. So, this time around, we’re using it on the front of the album and letting it take center stage as the main visual representation of the title track’s theme and the album as a whole. The other parts of the album’s new visual design are each close-ups of different sections of that same sculpture.