Title: Legends

With 'Legends,' I have created a significantly variable installation in memorial form that initiates a three-part conceptual triptych: Set 1: Musicians, Set 2: Actors, and Set 3: Superheroes. Together, these works explore the relentless cycles of identity, termination, and transformation.

My work confronts the high cost of becoming an icon. Drawing parallels to a snake shedding its skin to survive its next stage, or the suspension of life within a chrysalis, I focus on the necessary ending of the private self to achieve public iconography, a process I view as a radical form of freedom and self-liberation.

Through Legends, I interrogate how language claims authority over who we are. I utilize the authoritative quality of typography to create a memorial for self-interruption and rupture. The installation features 26 stacks of offset lithographs, one for each letter of the alphabet, where names are configured as an alphabetized riddle. These are the original birth names of famously influential figures; individuals whose birth identities were effectively shed or terminated to allow their culturally impactful avatars to be born and rise again.

Drawing a direct parallel between the marketing of an icon and my own navigation of the diaspora. In our modern urban landscape, advertising has become the primary architecture of identity, a canvas where urban metaphysics is required to make sense of a world that seems structured, yet one where it is so easy to be lost within the masses. By using the aesthetic of the mass-produced sheet, I highlight how birth names are "processed" into legends. Each sheet functions as a semiotic puzzle: the typography of the New Name (the legend) provides the structural authority, while the Birth Name (the ghost) provides the hidden content.

Through this relentless repetition, I confront the systemic necessity of unacceptance. I am suggesting that in our advertisement-driven existence, a name is often only as valuable as its ability to be authored and sold. By presenting these ghost names in a repetitive, industrial form, I am asking: in the rush to create a legend, who owns the original identity, and what is lost when a name is "typeset" for the public?