Select Works
Designers can be artists, and artists, designers. The line between the two is complex and intriguing. My practice actively includes personal expression—while satisfying an objective's constraints. Not adhering to convention forces every move I make to be intentional and purposeful. I'm always looking to create moments that lead to a *gasp*.
Land of Illness. Land of Wellness.
Part of The Cantos series of performances, Land of Illness. Land of Wellness. is a sequential, daily, live-streamed reading of 2000+ pages of email exchanges between myself and ‘Client A.’
This perfunctory review of 9 months is an interrogation of practice, and laid bare: reverence, courtship, hopes, vision, strategy, practicalities, authorship, people-pleasing, emotional management, hyperbole, rage—to ultimately, the threat of litigation. Returning to these electronic exchanges exposed the structure of client-based graphic design, and illuminated the true cost of digital communication. The month-long read was psychological time travel, that allowed an opportunity to exorcise any residual occupying forces held in the body.
The luminous Olivia Walthall witnessed the performance and created a video document, found here.
The Cantos is a reckoning of past work, behaviors and clients; a critique of the professional graphic design practice; a decades-long performance piece.
ORA+CLE
Part of The Cantos series of performances, ORA+CLE is a divination tool created to be performed, and designed with the needs of (professional) relationships in mind.
How to purify and make the designer/client union more perfect is rich with opportunity. Cultivating the intimacy necessary for a rewarding rapport is often avoided under the guise of being ‘professional.’ This fiction results in distrust, disinterest, dissatisfaction. On both sides. My stance is more emotional investment, not less, is the only way to conduct business. ORA+CLE is a tool to harness a paradigm shift.
Drawn from my client relationships and dynamics, ORA+CLE falls within the larger category of oracle decks, but distinguishes itself via immediacy of message, materiality, and how it leverages critical thinking.
The Cantos is a reckoning of past work, behaviors and clients; a critique of the professional graphic design practice; a decades-long performance piece.
All Beginnings
Part of The Cantos series of performances, All Beginnings is a collection of email comunication between client and designer from first contact to first asset delivery.
The broadsheet Zine includes exchanges with five clients. Each affirms the congenial & trusting relationship at the beginning of their project. When brought together, the abundance of treacle pleasantries portend, almost cinematically, a tragic ending to follow. The ‘drop’ that never comes. A multitude of questions about client relations performance abounds.
Cauterizing the first emails also allows for the interrogation of language used and emotions felt during this unique time in a professional relationship. The number of email back and forths required to even get to Round 1 is staggering, and illuminates: client deference, shared felt potential, and designer (over)performance.
The Cantos is a reckoning of past work, behaviors and clients; a critique of the professional graphic design practice; a decades-long performance piece.
Personal
An Epiphany
[Click above image for VIDEO]
As sweet as Turkish Delight
All about Abundance
