"Ash Tree Lane" Custom Nikes
These shoes were a platform for me to tell the story of a hard summer. They allowed me to exercise my skills in acrylic painting, themed storytelling, and utilizing new media to tell these stories.
They are themed after Mark Z. Danielewski's book "House of Leaves", in which a supernaturally expanding house puts a photographer and his family through a psychological crucible.
The upper of the shoe is painted in a seemingly endless floor plan, with different colors suggesting different things. This labyrinthine design seems to offer no escape, but the escape is in knowing what lies inside. The blue lines on the shoes are the floor plans to the places I've spent the most time in during this time. The small detail in these places is the inclusion of only the room I've felt most comfortable in within that place. The house is pictured is my own, with my room being the one included. The spiral of the right shoe and the green hallway on the left are both direct references to the book. The spiral is a staircase that descends either endlessly or finitely depending on the outlook of the person navigating it. The hallway is almost never ending, with doors that slam shut without warning and others that won't open unless they are thought to be. The text on the upper of the shoe is a poem I wrote, encoded using an Atbash cipher. For the curious, here is the coded poem:
"Rm lizmtv-ivw gsv illnh dviv xozw,
Orpv zoo gsv szooh ovug vnkgb zmw hzw.
Gsv xlnrmt xsroo dlfow ovzev gsvn yziv, yfg tivvm dlfow xlnv rm fmzdziv
Gszg gsv slfhv lu
Ovzevh szw yoldm zdzb, hrmxv gsv gifmp dzh zodzbh gsviv gl hgzb.
These sneakers are a reflection of the idea that no matter how lost one may seem, they can always find a way through. This is conveyed through the fact that the labyrinth of the shoes always has a continuing path somewhere, as well as in the ciphered text. This project was very difficult, and took about 3 weeks, with significant planning beforehand.