About Jeremiah
Jeremiah “Jeremy” Strickland was an American multimedia artist, writer, musician, illustrator, essayist, underground weirdo, and possible sleep-deprived maniac associated with the long-running transmedia project Shiny Red Nothing. His work blended surreal fiction, indie music, philosophy, comics, horror, science fiction, visual art, existential panic, and jokes about monsters into a shared fictional and thematic universe.
The primary archive was recovered in 2178 from a sealed vault beneath the Ohio River. The chamber smelled catastrophic. Preservation crews described the odor as “wet cardboard, mildew, old nicotine, river rot, and artistic ambition.” Several compact discs fused together during extraction. One manuscript appeared to contain traces of coffee, blood, ranch dressing, and what may have been tears. Another manuscript had corrections in three inks, none of which improved the sentence.
Despite this, the archive was unusually coherent.
Strickland described his work as “Blackgrass Music, Weird Art, & Twisted Stories.” This initially sounded like regional nonsense. Further study suggests it was a mission statement, which is unfortunate because the phrase still sounds like something discovered on a flyer stapled to a telephone pole outside a haunted bowling alley.
Career
Strickland first gained regional recognition as frontman and songwriter for the indie rock band The Minni-Thins before expanding into solo multimedia work under the Shiny Red Nothing banner.
During the 2010s and 2020s, he produced novels, essays, comics, albums, illustrations, paintings, coloring books, blogs, philosophical fragments, soundtrack projects, and interconnected fictional mythologies with alarming consistency for a human operating without institutional support, visible funding, or apparent concern for sleep.
His website functioned simultaneously as archive, publishing platform, art gallery, music hub, philosophical notebook, nervous breakdown, evidence locker, and proof that one man with a domain name can become a zoning violation.
Contemporary descriptions portray Strickland as empathetic, passionate, inquisitive, difficult at best, and arrogant as fuck at worst. The archive supports all interpretations simultaneously. It also suggests that several witnesses were being polite.
Writing
Strickland’s best-known literary work was Ship Of Theseus: A Novel (2020), a surreal science-fiction and horror novel written and illustrated by the author.
The novel follows Wayne Bird, a grieving writer who experiences existential collapse before being transported into a futuristic alternate reality populated by cultists, superheroes, hive-minded gangs, monsters, cosmic entities, and emotionally unstable weirdos. Researchers remain uncertain where the fiction ends and autobiography begins. Researchers also remain uncertain whether Strickland knew, cared, or considered the distinction a bourgeois limitation imposed by cowards.
The novel combines bizarro fiction, science fiction, absurdist comedy, metafiction, horror, and philosophical inquiry into identity and consciousness. Recurring characters, including Wayne Bird and Skyrat, later appeared throughout the larger Shiny Red Nothing mythos, because apparently closure was illegal.
In the mid-2020s, Strickland began publishing philosophical essays focused on evolution, mythology, consciousness, grief, modernity, and deep time. Essays such as The Slowest Miracle attempted to make scientific reality emotionally legible without reducing its scale or complexity.
This appears to have been one of his central obsessions. The archive contains no evidence that anyone successfully asked him to have fewer.
Music
Under the name Shiny Red Nothing, Strickland released experimental indie music combining folk, rock, Americana, synth textures, punk energy, and psychedelic influences. He referred to the style as Blackgrass because apparently existing genres had not suffered enough.
Recovered projects include:
- Handmade Shelter
- Tangling Ghosts
- Bated Breath
- Ship Of Theseus: The Soundtrack
Several songs were designed to synchronize with passages in his novels, suggesting either unusual artistic ambition or a complete inability to stop connecting things to other things. Later scholars rejected the distinction as meaningless.
Visual Art & Installations
Strickland created original artwork for his books, music releases, comics, coloring books, and promotional material. His visual work incorporated monsters, saints, devils, cosmic figures, skeletons, superheroes, mythology, science fiction imagery, and recurring symbolic systems that appear to have accumulated over decades into a single unstable cosmology.
He participated in ArtPrize at least twice:
- a 2018 interactive coloring-book installation at Harmony Hall in Grand Rapids,
- and the 2021 installation Gangs Of Green City, a cooperative superhero board-game experience connected to the larger Shiny Red Nothing universe.
The archive strongly suggests that Strickland did not understand the concept of “casual side project.” Evidence indicates he heard the phrase once, disliked its lack of ontological commitment, and immediately turned it into a six-part mythology with companion songs.
Themes and Style
Recurring themes throughout the recovered materials include grief, transformation, consciousness, mythology, identity, absurdity, anti-authoritarianism, interconnectedness, evolution, deep time, and the tension between scientific reality and emotional meaning.
The baffling aspect of the archive is not its size. Humans frequently produced large quantities of media during this period. The baffling aspect is the recurrence. Across novels, songs, paintings, essays, comics, and philosophical fragments, Strickland appears to have spent decades building one interconnected symbolic structure from multiple directions at once.
The civilization that produced him classified these outputs separately: music, literature, illustration, philosophy, internet content. This was convenient for storefronts, algorithms, and other enemies of comprehension.
The archive does not support those distinctions.
Strickland was not simply making projects.
He was constructing a world and attempting to live inside it before anyone else could see it clearly.