I created the visual identity and helped conceptualize the product over the course of a semester in my grad program.
The Free Nashville Poetry Library is a community reading room and poetry collection featuring over 3000+ titles. I not only designed the logo, graphics, and merch, but also printed the shirts and engraved custom-made pocket knives using a tattoo machine. For their first few months of programming, I designed posters for readings and performances held in the space.
design for Snooper sold on their 2022 tour:
designed, dyed, and printed with Maria Cardenas for the SF MOMA book bazaar:
shirts dyed with ceremonial kumkum powder (made from turmeric and slaked lime) that I collected from various temples throughout the andha pradesh region of india. these shirts were made for my parents ongoing 'temple tour' wherein every two weeks they visit a different hindu temple in the united states and india; the dates and locations are listed on the back.
designed, dyed, and printed for the Free Nashville Poetry Library:
The photo book below contains images from Born x Raised’s legendary Sadie Hawkins event. This project was commissioned as a tribute to BxR founder and LA legend Chris “Spanto” Printup. I designed and fabricated the book in an edition of 7; the front and back covers are engraved gray mirrored acrylic. The 50 color photos are inkjet printed alongside a 40 page black & white riso section. The images (as well as the images of the book below) are by Vikram Valluri.
Identity Theft
Identity Theft is a book of orignal essays and interviews coupled with posters and various visual ephemera from my family history. Through extensive interviews with my dad about his immigration saga, I have extracted themes through the lens of a bicultural anxiety to produce prints on paper, canvas, and wax.
Tattoo History Book I wrote, designed, and fabricated this book outlining the history of tattooing from its Polynesian roots to present day styles and trends. There is a typography chapter that includes a plexi case with removable silicone swatches that I tattooed with American traditional, calligraphic, script, and new school lettering. Other chapters touch on the contested history of ‘freakshows’, the Japanese yakuza and irezumi, and tattooing’s crossover with the fine art world.
Four in All
The photo book shown below includes images of auto-rickshaw vinyl decals taken throughout the Andhra Pradesh region of South India. Interspersed with these images are photoshopped images of Bay Area vehicles emulating this style vernacular using “western” image motifs and clip-art. Seeing these images side-by-side highlights the glaring differences in the visual lived-experiences of these two cultures. The front and back covers are laser engraved acrylic with spraypaint accents.
Pocket Spirograph
These spirograph sets feature three “pages” of acrylic spirograph pieceswith clear plexi separating each compartment. The variation in shapes and sizes allows for a different drawing experience with every use. The shapes are based on a recursive process; I first used a classic spirograph set to create geometric circular drawings, then isolated organic images from these drawings and laser-cut them into their own set.
In 1845, John O’Sullivan wrote that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” This idea was quickly adopted as a justification for unfettered westward expansion, including the annexation of Texas, the Mexican-American War, and the acquisition of western territories like California and Oregon. The ties to divinity and American exceptionalism in this concept have since spread to the rest of the world, creating an enduring and mythic promise of wealth and opportunity. This sentiment of course reached my parents, and others like them who immigrated to the United States on a singular mission of prosperity and security.
In considering my own journey from Tennessee to the Bay Area, there are fleeting glimpses of this instinct, as I follow in the tradition of westward expansion and the promise of new opportunity and experience. There is an underlying anxiety to this assumption, encapsulated perfectly by Joan Didion in her essay, “Notes From a Native Daughter”:
“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
