January 2023 - Present
Growth Opportunity
I sat down with a free Friday night in 2022 and asked myself, “If I was to make an art series, what story would I tell?” The first word that came to mind was hope. I spend a lot of time thinking about hope. I care a lot about how we/I treat the planet because THAT has a huge effect on people. I got to grow up in a place sheltered from a lot of negative effects but I’ve since lived in lots of places, like in Brooklyn next to a nuclear waste storage facility and LA’s Chinatown fenced in by freeways and I’ve been neighbors with an air polluting drop forge and old lead fields. I’ve seen close-up communities those with money and power were willing to sacrifice to get more money and power. And in those places, I’ve also met the most smart, loving, resilient people who I call Growth Opportunists.
They’re the ones who see the potential for beauty, healing and life in the places everyone else has forgotten or discarded. They’re the ones planting flowers in the sidewalk cracks.
These Opportunists have taken over my brain. By taking photos of cracked sidewalks and imagining them as vegetable gardens or native plant prairies, I hope to inspire a new generation of opportunists - one big enough to make imagination reality.
character development
i wanted everyone to imagine themselves as a growth opportunist so the first character wore a sweatshirt with the hood hiding any face it might have. however, i felt it lacked a loveability factor and couldn’t settle on something that felt right through pen sketches.
when midjourney images filled my timeline, i decided to use it to iterate. the first attempts were frightening and any addition of “futuristic” led to astronaut helmets - which felt apocalyptic but had a great proportion. “futuristic beekeeper” was the prompt that inspired the final form factor and iconic bucket hat addition.
location, location, location
living in los angeles’ chinatown, i often encounter cracks in the pavement on my daily walks.
as an act of reimagining my city, i now take photos of them and use them as the foundation for growth opportunity pieces - visualizing the world we could have with a little more planting, caring and sharing.
