photos: Stephen Pulvirent

We all start drawing as children, and I think that's where I started too. Pens and pencils are accessible to all of us, [but] I think a lot of us stop drawing somewhere along the way. I loved drawing as a child. I loved watching cartoons. I love creating characters and worlds and using that as a tool to imagine things that I couldn't see in front of me.

I think all of us have a unique style that's inside of us, and it's more of a path of extracting that style along our way as artists. For myself, I've always been interested in black and white work, always been interested in things being simple. But I think I kind of harnessed my style when I moved to Japan where I worked as a VJ (video jockey). I would create live digital illustrations along with DJs, dancers, and musicians. That meant for hours at a time I was drawing live, extracting my style from the inside outside. When you are drawing live, you don't have time to think, you don't have time to plan, you don't have time to hesitate – but, more importantly, you don't have time to be anyone else but yourself.

I think when you are an artist, especially in today's society, people want to put you in a box. I believe that being an artist, we have the biggest box of freedom, of creation, and it's actually our job to take some of those walls down. So, if you look at the body of my work, I've done a spectrum of things from different mediums and industries, from academic teaching at places like MIT, NYU, and Columbia to choreographing ballet to product collaborations with furniture companies like Flos and B&B Italia. The common thread is myself and I believe that we all have this within us. If we can go to any medium and any industry and bring our full self to it, whatever we do will look like us, feel like us, move like us, and sound like us.

Sometimes when you work with colour, it's very easy. “Oh, it's pretty, I get it.” We're all animals and we're attracted to colours like reds and yellows. And there's kind of a hierarchy of how you process things. When you work with black and white, you are not tapping into that. You are almost saying to the audience, “You discover it on your own terms.” So, when you approach work that is black and white, I think it's calming and it has more space for discovery.                       

Within my practice, you see a lot of words, phrases, and questions. In a way, I see the words as drawings – words are made up of lines, after all. It's only that we have this emotional baggage attached to them because we've used them in other ways in many different forms.

As I sit down to work on a project, I try to just clear my mind, just so that I'm starting with a blank canvas and am not bringing any external baggage. However, I do like the idea of play, of openness, of being confident, but also allowing things to flow and to be what they need to be. I believe that for every moment and every time in every space, there is a drawing that already exists. To pull that drawing into a place of existence, you need to be calm and just allow things to fold and unfold in the way that they're meant to.

It was probably a couple of years ago and I just had to do a double take. What is that? What's happening? It’s interesting because it doesn't look like it's real in a way, so it has this sense of futurism and imagination, but at the same time, it's just very beautiful and recognizable. Then I moved on to trying to understand it.

"I love the concept of now actually working with a timepiece
that also reflects where we are in time and how we are in time"

The older you get, the more work you have created, and more work is around that you can look back on and reflect upon. Within my work, there's definitely recurring words and phrases and characters that come up, but especially in my performances are the concepts of time and space. Time is just such a wonderful thing. It is something that we can do something with. We're actually living in it. It's something that's ahead of us and behind us and within us and the space that we occupy also has time threaded throughout it. I love the concept of working with a timepiece that also reflects where we are in time and how we are in time.

What fascinates me is that you can’t see the disks moving immediately. It quite literally takes time. That’s the beauty of select architecture; it has a mystery to it which you may not see immediately. There is something that awakens in the viewer or the user - the sense of wonderment and mystery. It is incredibly comfortable to wear – with its dome like structure. I can instantly tell the time. Its clarity is refreshing, especially when you're tired and travelling and you just need an instant connection to your watch. 

When I showed it to my family and friends, they were amazed. In fact, a lot of people ask about this watch and can’t recommend it enough.