Mixed Drinks

Grad school was a weird time for me, and at the end of the first year I felt really defeated and out of place. I was psyching myself out, and the things that I was making just weren’t hitting the right spots. Thinking big wasn’t necessarily the problem, I just wasn’t thinking like myself. So I had to take some time and go back and remember why I liked drawing, and art, and everything that I held close to me, and that process eventually became the core of my thesis.

Along with romancing the past, I wanted to talk about ideas of history in general, both real and imaginary.  On the real end of the spectrum, I was deeply involved with my relationship to my past work, my influences, and my lifestyle; For the imaginary I began the conversation thinking about parallel worlds, time travel, and other comic book-y stuff, but over the course of the project it became more existential and depressing-reliving the past, history repeating itself, letting go. I spent a lot of time thinking about how stories were constructed and decided that I needed to construct one that showed a past and present (both fictional and not) that was both linear and happening entirely all at once. Theres a lot of repetition and images that were repurposed or altered, a lot of little things like song lyrics, pop culture references, text messages, jokes and stories that only I really know, all coming together to form something bigger. With Mixed Drinks, I wanted to convey a certain sense of normality to the aspects of my life that people found weird or destructive; life can be sad and amazing at the same time. It’s pure pop but also dense; if you had a couple hours and more than a couple beers, I could map out and explain every circle and every object and how they relate to each other.

I spent the first half of the summer before this sweating and drinking my way through the city, and the second half driving across the country listening to Neil Young, Tom Petty, and Kanye West. It was the summer of Yeezus, and that album grabbed me instantly. It was mean and lean, and it was consistently playing during the time I was making Mixed Drinks, and really helped me find the look I wanted to go for. After spending a long time not thinking about halftones for my work, I decided I needed to go back. If my undergrad project, Imaginauts, was my version of a big colorful blockbuster, I wanted Mixed Drinks to be kind of punk-rock indie movie.

All in all, the project consisted of eight separate pieces that form one overarching story, consisting of 143 different prints of various sizes. From there, each print was mounted on MDF circles that came out from the wall at a few different lengths. This was all done in a deluded sort of “this will definitely work,” attitude, as I didn’t know how to hang them up until I started to set up for the RISD thesis exhibition. But, alas, it all worked out.

The couple months after I finished it, I felt drained, and I struggled to build up a new vocabulary of imagery and ideas, mainly because I exhausted many of them. I always envisioned the whole thing as an end, my thoughts about a specific time and place, bringing all the components to completion, walking away and never doing them again (for a period of time, right up until the last few days or so, there was an image of a mike on the floor after it was dropped, but I nixed it – a little too on the nose, I think). And in addition, I always wanted the thing to be sort of a time capsule. I was dabbling with the complexities of time, but I wanted the 2013/14 me to be pretty present in there. I was feeling really alone and depressed, but at the same time I never wanted to betray the love of everything good going on, or look back in anger while making it. While spite is a great tool in motivating me, I never wanted it to seem like I didn’t ultimately enjoy the process or the events I depicted in the dang thing.

Here's a selection of images featured in Mixed Drinks.

Thesis Book

As part of the whole thesis thing at RISD students had to create an accompanying book for their project. I broke down each of the eight compositions into their base theme (influences, traveling, memories…) and began to construct a series of vignettes that dealt with those themes.

The entire book was 12”x12”, screen-printed on black paper, and hand bound. 

You can check out a digital version of it right here.