The Wallets

Since 2000, The Wallets has served as an evolving record of my life—a series of yearly companions that double as sculptural works and performance artifacts. Each year begins with the same clean, black wallet—a blank slate, identical in form yet destined to evolve into something entirely unique. Over the months, the wallet becomes a living canvas, plastered with stickers, street slap art, and the accumulated residue of experience. These objects are simultaneously personal relics and collective documents, bearing the marks of time, place, and interaction.

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The wallet, a quintessential item in the lives of men, is both a vessel of utility and a symbol of identity. It carries our most vital tokens: money, identification, and artifacts of daily exchange. For many, it represents a tether to the material world—a portable archive of transactions, moments, and intentions. Yet in The Wallets, the item transcends its traditional role, becoming a diary without words, imbued with the spirit of its year and its keeper.

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Historically, the wallet’s lineage traces back to leather pouches used in ancient trade—a symbol of wealth, power, and agency. Over time, it has become a deeply personal object, reflecting its owner’s habits, values, and even secrets. In occult traditions, the exchange of money is charged with energetic and spiritual significance, often seen as a form of ritual offering or transfer of power. A wallet, as the keeper of such exchanges, becomes a totemic object—a repository of energies tied to prosperity, survival, and desire.

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Within my practice, these wallets serve not only as artifacts of personal history but also as sculptural relics charged with the weight of time and human interaction. They are simultaneously intimate and public, drawing connections between the private ritual of carrying and the external impact of urban art and street culture.

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The Wallets invites viewers to consider the mundane object as a sacred vessel, rich with memory and mystery. Each wallet is a year encapsulated—a personal history rendered visible, tangible, and enduring. And for a few, lost somewhere in time.