On September 6th, 2000, my 29th birthday, I began a time-lapsed project in response to a personal crisis which required a ritual sacrifice. Every morning, I ironed on block letters onto a new white Hanes t-shirt and wore it the whole day regardless of where I was going. I took a polaroid of myself wearing the shirt at some point in the day. I was often alone and I would shoot the picture in what was a handheld polaroid "selfie," ages before selfies became a thing. The daily messages were compiled from my own writing based on personal experiences and observations, song lyrics, poems, and excerpts from my reading at the time. I kept a folder and jotted down notes whenever a group of words struck me as worthy of wearing for an entire day. This was before you could find computers and printers in every house. I had to go to my friend Tiza’s home in Waikiki every few days and use her iMac G3 to flip my block letters and print them onto iron-on decal sheets. I kept several of these along with fresh t-shirts on me in case I spent the night somewhere. I never missed a day for over four months, although the plan was to do it for a year. Toward the end, I fell in love and the ritual sacrifice released me to my fate.
A lot of the writing on the t-shirts was my own, like the one in the photo here, “Even Jesus wanted a little more time.”
I took the project to that year’s Artists of Hawaii and they gave me The Cynthia Eyre Award. The elderly gentleman, a family member representing the award, told me he didn’t understand what my work was about. Fortunately, the curator got it.
Here are the (130) polaroids. For some reason, September 12th is missing. Interesting to note that the entire thing begins with Nietzsche and ends with disco.
