reprage

It was surprisingly hard to say goodbye to the Mars Yard 2.5’s. I always knew they were on loan and I’d have to send them back Nike, but it was surreal wearing one of only ?150 pairs of these shoes on the planet. I’m sure if I still lived in a big city someplace, I would have accumulated a stash of culture credit, like when a famous actress is loaned a designer dress to wear to the Oscars. Except I’m not famous and I wore the sneakers in the mud and dirt of northern Australia…

Despite the lack of a red carpet, those shoes still took me on an adventure. It wasn’t travel in the traditional sense, although we did a bit of that too. It was more of an inner-space escapade – the shoes and I explored new ideas, wrote software, and made plywood babies together. With each new shared experience, I slowly built a bond with those shoes. I had never bonded with a pair of shoes before. A car, yes. But shoes? It was a first.

That’s why it was so difficult to say goodbye to the Mars Yard 2.5’s. They had become a symbol of several months of creativity and what I had discovered about myself along the way.

A picture of a left Tom Sachs Mars Yard 2.5 shoe.

Originally written for the Sachsian Syndicate.

Previously: TGIM 23 - So, to say at the end of a project that this art is worth “X” dollars, I’m implicitly defining how good I think it is. I’m comparing and measuring my work against all the art that has preceded it.

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