Radical Romanticism: the tag

There was a time when wanting to be seen meant going out at night with a can of spray paint.

You chose a wall, a bridge, a train. Somewhere visible, somewhere that mattered. And you left your mark, not your name exactly, but a signature. A code, a shape that said: I was here. I exist. Remember me. It was called vandalism. It was illegal, raw, honest.

Now we do it differently.

We are allowed to tag 20 brands before breakfast. We @ our way through the day, we craft our @ like they crafted their tags : with style, obsession, with the desperate and beautiful need to be seen. We throw up content the way they threw up letters hoping something sticks.

The wall is a feed now, the spray can is a phone and the bridge is an algorithm. The signature is an @ and nobody calls it vandalism. But is it the same hunger ?

It remains: See me. Know me. I am here. 

The old tag was a secret language, a code between those who knew. It lived on the wall for years, it had weight.
The modern tag disappears in 24 hours or when an account is acked. It performs visibility while practicing invisibility. It is vandalism without consequence, presence without permanence and we have all agreed, silently, to call it content.

Here, I make objects that stay. Not performances of presence, just a call to question presence.
Because I believe beauty is an act of resistance. Because I believe presence is cultivated, slowly, through matter, through touch, through the things we choose to keep, the diner we celebrate.

The @ fades. The object remains.

Objects that stay. Beauty that holds.

Dinner Plate