Proof of Life is a still life dissection of items I’ve carried with me in my life. These items are well worn, personally “customized”, and loved. They represent the best parts of me.

I want viewers to desire these objects to the same degree that I care for them.

To accomplish this, the work references popular advertising from the 1980s to the 1990s. 
This era was defined by loud, confident, and graphic representations of desirable things down to the last detail.

This time was lived vicariously for me through my family, with both older parents and older brothers, I received every hand-me-down.  Being the youngest of three brothers meant I was given all the well-loved and well used things to cherish.

It is my intention for the audience to see these wear marks, feel the touch of another person, and understand that we as a consumer culture can express our care for one another through physical and mundane things. 

I want to reinforce that I’ve decided to keep these objects close as an expression of myself, and to in essence advertise to others what kind of person I am.

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There’s been an ongoing struggle in my life that I’ve sidelined for a long time. Self-explanation is difficult in a city so vast. The ways I define myself are in a visual language that no longer exists for me. What once was my own piece of Americana has disappeared into the 21st century, carried off to cities like myself, nearly unrecognizable. So, like a child, I define myself wholly by the place of my birth. I construct a set for myself to feel at home, and I dress like how I imagined the ideal man to be. Hats off before dinner, hunting knife on your 21st birthday, and hand-me-downs. 

Woolrich is an emotional exploration of trying to return to somewhere I can only imagine now. America’s oldest outdoor clothing company was integrated into my hometown, and then it was gone. I was holding on to the relics of this brand in the hope that they’d help me know myself as I went off on my own path in search of my own career. I wanted these images to be childish, cerebral, and like a kid who just learned a curse word. I wanted them to be very upfront, very naïve, and altogether ignorant. I’m trying to show my identity through the rare pieces of clothing I own from a brand nobody has ever heard of. Some items are handmade by my deceased family from the same factory town. My mother dated the last original owner in high school. My aunt was the general secretary for the headquarters for 20 years. 

I felt like this brand was something that mimics myself. This homegrown idea gets taken to the rest of the outside world and reinvented into something that doesn’t quite resemble itself anymore.