For this project I had to think about all of the different things I collect and/or hold dear to me. The first things that came to mind were my Coca-Cola bottle collection, my younger selves key chain collection, my guitars and some geodes.

Since I decorate my house similarly to the inside of a cabinet of curiosities I considered just photographing my apartment, it also crossed my mind to have a bit of a field trip and invite everyone over. Though this was just a lazy solution to the project criteria. I quickly remembered I have an old acoustic guitar a good friend bequeathed upon me years ago which is in total disrepair. Considering the condition of the guitar I had no problem altering it to become a "cabinet". After cutting the doors out, sanding down the wood and installing the hinges, I was feeling rather good about the outcome, though nervous I was to be cutting it, since I only had one shot at it.

Once this guitar became a cabinet I had to decide what objects I could fill it with. As much as I wanted to show off some of my collections, I just could bring myself to remove them from their homes in my apartment. That is except one collection, my keychain collection.

The majority of my collection are of places my Father had travelled to throughout the years. Every country, city or state he visited he would bring me back a keychain, which completely made up for the fact that he travelled so much. Alongside of all the keychains from different places, I have also included some keychains I would consider "oddities" as well as a few which remind me of my childhood.

I hope you enjoy my Cabinet of Curiosities as much as I do!

For this project, I decided to use a traffic light I have had for years, since 1990 to be exact. In this time so much has changed with the design of lights as well as the vehicles they control. It got me thinking that there needs to be something left to depict what life is like now for future generations. My hope is that one day gasoline vehicles will be a thing of the past, or as we know it, our present. 

This cave painting is more of a time capsule of sorts. It is to be left to be found by people of the future as a reminder of what life was like hundreds of years ago, in hopes that similar mistakes are not made. On the back of the traffic light i depicted two vehicles with smoke coming from their tailpipes, this smoke converges to make a smog cloud, an example of the pollution created by these machines. The cloud wraps around the light engulfing the red stop light. This represents the moment in time when collectively we become aware of the problems caused by big oil companies, as well as the pollution created by the vehicles of today. Alongside the vehicles on the back I have included two of the worlds largest oil companies, BP and Aramco.

For this project I must say I struggled with figuring out what direction I wanted to go in for creating my own language. Picking the quote was easy, I went with my favorite quote by James Dean "Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today."

At first I was trying to use Chinese characters to relate to each English character, while having the Chinese be a second quote which I like, in turn having two quotes in one. After spending several hours making myself insane I decided to try a different route. For my second attempt I tried relating each letter or sound in my quote to a sound/chord. Doing this would create music from speech. After realizing that this again was not going to work and staring at my computer keyboard for so long, I decided to incorporate modern technology into the project.

Everyone knows emoji's derived from using keyboard symbols to create little faces. Well I decided to create symbols for each letter of the alphabet. After doing this I decided to utilize a plank of wood which has a very smooth, almost seamless split. I took advantage of this to have the quote and key to the language hidden inside this "found" piece of wood.