Week III February 2023 - SamJ Studios

Coming into my second week, I can’t ignore the memes of Checks or the new “innovative” bitcoin inscriptions. To be honest, both I find not only redundant, but also unimportant to my personal practice but I’m happy to see the NFT culture revitalized behind new projects. I’m not participating in the open edition meta myself but I made this piece for Valentine’s Day as take on Checks just for some fun. It’s been a while since working with a physical production so crafting this shoot was a refreshing experience.

I wore the same dress as I wore when I crashed the SuperRare gallery at NFTNYC last year with “Refusés Par Le Crypto Art” as a link connecting the bloody red markings on my back to the red rejection stamps I designed and 3D printed for the back of the piece from June. Exploring the deeper “SamJ” creative meta is always something I enjoy, and I find myself revisiting many themes surrounding things like the color red, in my SuperRare genesis work or BTFIL , the material of tulle and other sheer fabrics as seen in FLAO and Reflections (Reflections is currently open for offers), along side grid patterns I use for many of the thumbnails of my work and my website.

This week I have been indulging myself with a deep dive of fashion, both in the realms of digital and physical. I was inspired by the latest Schiaparelli collection, and Viktor & Rolf collection to try a unique construction of a physical gown that has a far more sculptural foundation (while also playing with more tulle of course). It’s been an interesting study of material, construction, and order of operations, but in the end I it didn’t go as planned. After completing what I thought would’ve been a successful bodice, I realize that fundamentally my design failed as a sculptural element of fashion and didn’t stand up or hold its structure. I decided to break down the process into something that was more within the range of my knowledge and try to recover materials for a new design.

I actually found this quite interesting, because I have not experienced such an obtuse roadblock in my creative process for quite a long time and operating outside the bounds of my knowledge has led me to be more creative with my approach to problem solving in regards to my creativity. It’s fun to always work with these physical processes that can lead to catastrophic failure in such a way that, in my experience, digital media cannot recreate due to the ease of the undo function. Experiencing failure and recalibrating my creative process is always humbling yet rewarding when I can successfully navigate the mental detour to a new satisfactory result. During the fabrication of this bodice, which will later become a gown, I’ve realized that dress making and fashion design brings me a deep inner peace that I haven’t felt in many years. This is an exciting discovery as one of my goals this year is to grow further into the fashion industry, so I’m glad that my goals are aligning with my intuition so gracefully (for now).

I’m very grateful to have you all here participating in my newsletter, as having a direct connection to everyone is something I really appreciate. Recently twitter has been going down at an alarming rate and the algorithm is further suppressing many artists and friends. With much of our community centralized on twitter it feels very lonely now that I essentially don’t see anyone on my timeline anymore, so thank you for staying connected with me here!

I’ll end this week with a few pieces of art that I find inspiring, as I’ve observed a through line between the mechanical functions and the playfulness of these kinetic sculptures. I’d love to explore how the experience of these works could translate to VR/the metaverse in a way relevant to my body of work! I’ll also once again include my Spotify playlists from last week that I’m containing to update.

Slay the house down boots besties,

SamJ