Blackjack 18lackmonster is a character created by the Artist Tavarus Blackmon. The surname Blackmonster is an Anglo-Saxon name representing Black or Black wearing people of Kent and Blackmanstone in Kent England. The name has roots in the White Monastery, the first Coptic Monastery in Egypt. Blackmonster is a bastardization of the name Blancminster, which more appropriately connects it linguistically to its monastic heritage. The Artist first created a Halloween mask in 2016 after watching a music video for the Peach Kelli Pop song, "Halloween Mask." The mask looked like an executioner's hood and at the time there were many connotations to the term "hood," in popular culture, specifically the hoodie and the Klansman's hood. Dialectic colloquialism, "the hood," is another rich and rife sociological field but the Artist asserts the hood is a cowl more akin to the monastic tradition. The connection of the cowl to popular culture can be made with Batman's cowl. Batman or Badman, is another name bastardized through culture, meaning one whom prays for others. However, the Artist Blackmonster is no fantasy character, but an multi-dimensional expression of the Artist psyche during the process of improvisational endurance artwork performance. The term monster has been used through culture to express many things, mostly unwanted or horrific. But the most horrific element within the 18lackmonster myth and lore is that it is a representation of the father in American culture, monstous in nature, repleat in its hunger for control. This is not the Artist's idea of the father, but the Artist's expression of the father that has been inculcated within this culture. Making the Black Father a subject of inquiry shows the labor of Art and the labor of domesticity as one multi-dimensional space where the Artist can pay the bills and raise their children. Blackjack 18lackmonster is an enigma, that with each successive performance or, endurance, a new chapter of the story is told. Therefore, this has become a working research as practice for the Artist to express the most difficult truths. Such as the vulnerability to share improvised work with the public, removing the visage and expressing the unseen.

