My Five Year Plan (D) and Recent Work

March 4, 2020

In 2015 I wrote a 5-year year plan. This wasn’t the first one I’d written, there was another one two years prior, but I can’t seem to find it. Back then my focus was mostly towards learning more about and incorporating fashion into my practice in a more purposeful way. I’d taken a year off from teaching, sold my place in Toronto and used that money to partly fund personal creative projects that I’d not been able to afford because I didn’t have the money. I’d been saving since I was ten years old and there’ve been so many moments when I had to cash in on big things and then start over again such as paying for school, buying my first apartment, and backpacking through Europe. Coming from a working-class family, I learned from a very early age the need to balance my present and my future in order to create a kind of life which I believed my future self might want. Now, it’s time again to pitch forward and cash in on my life. I hate dipping into my savings, but part of me believes that my younger self saved this money in order to help my current self to continue along my creative path.

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March 4, 2025

I went to bed late last night after doing some final touch ups on a piece I’m working on - it's for my solo show in a Chelsea gallery that's coming up in September. It’s funny because years ago when I dreamt about this moment I imagined I’d be making paintings, but now it’s completely changed. I have some digital/video artwork that’s motion based as well as a performance piece in my show. I remember years ago I struggled to break outside of illustration because I felt like drawing had to be my only medium, but now I’ve figured how to still incorporate it into my art without having to purely rely on it... it feels good. It feels freeing. The past five years I’ve spent trying to psychologically get over my hang ups with being nude in front of an audience – to feel less nervous about my body, and being seen by others. I remember when it used to feel really uncomfortable because I coupled nudity with shame, but since I’ve placed my body at the core of my art practice it’s really helped to shift my relationship to it and the way in which it (and I) relate to others and the environment, and vice versa. I used to feel so nervous performing on stage and in front of the camera, which is why its’s so weird and ironic that performance has become one of the centers of my practice. I still think about a video by Ann Hamilton that I saw years ago – it was her installation The Event of a Thread, as well as an interactive video piece by Camille Utterback called Text Rain. I think these were the earliest traces of when my work began to shift away from purely drawing into one that’s now more interdisciplinary. I’ve also been talking to the people at Volta and the Whitney Biennial. Our conversation started years ago when they scheduled a studio visit with me… it was cool. We met through a mutual friend when I was part of a group show at The Drawing Center in Soho, two years ago – they’ve been following my work and want to see it develop. Fingers cross that I’ll be in the next two shows.

By now I thought I would’ve had a custom T-shirt line, or had been more closely linked to fashion. I remember years ago being asked if I could design a capsule collection for a fashion company, which gave me hope that maybe if I devoted more money and time to learning about the industry then I could make it happen. But in the end, the experience felt more like blood-letting. The time, energy and money I put into trying to self-fund my fashion education wasn’t worth the return. I’m glad I’m finally out of debt. It’s taken me ten years and now my credit card is at a $0 balance -- financially this is the most stable I’ve felt in my entire life. When I let go of my studio years ago there was a kind of sadness about it, not only because I no longer had a workspace separate from my home, but in general, I felt really sad during that time in my life. I think it was necessary to come back home, literally and metaphorically, and to build a new practice that felt smaller, stripped down, and focused instead of one that was so schizophrenic. Anyhow, after spending years of dabbling in this area of design, I’ve gotten the fashion bug out of me… well, almost. I still collaborate with brands and just finished a print campaign with Rihanna where I did a bunch of illustrations that became the foundation print for a capsule collection that she’s collaborating with Dior. My drawings will be on some of her clothing as well as on cosmetic packaging, and a short video on social media. The last part was most exciting because I wasn’t just a hired-hand to make drawings, but I worked closely with the director on the video.

Today I have a few things going on… I have to finish up my edits to my children’s book, and I’m working on a longer-term public art project in Chicago that’ll be due in 3 years. It’s an outdoor piece in a park – I’ve never made a sculpture at this size before, but I’m up for the challenge. I remember when I did my first public art project in 2020 – it was a glass mural in an art school in Queens. It was one of the most challenging work experiences I’d had up to that point - not in terms of making the work, but the difficulties came from learning how to collaborate and speak with the vendors, fabricators and installers. Now, I feel a lot more confident. It’s weird because I used to be so meek in front of clients and anyone who I believed knew more than me, or had some kind of power, but I don’t feel this way anymore. The biggest lesson that I took away from that project wasn’t only the information on how to make work on a large scale, but rather how to speak to people in a way that makes them listen to you and want to work with you. Back then, it was my project manager who taught me this lesson and become my guide and mentor through my first public art project. I quietly thank her all the time for this because she taught me how to tap into my boss-self while still being kind. It’s a fine balance but having worked in the creative industry for over twenty years, I’ve finally learned how to communicate in spaces where others might devalue or underestimate you. It’s a joke really, and I laugh at people when they behave this way… but like Oprah says, “It’s wonderful to be underestimated.”

Anyhow, enough writing. I gotta go. I’ll probably take off a bit early today…  I have a phone meeting at 3:30 and then I’ll walk and feed Shalby and then head to Volta afterwards.