Failure is part of everyone’s experience. We spend most of our lives failing with the hope to achieve some measurable amount of success. These are broad concepts and I can only address them in their relevance to myself and my experiences.

Taking inspiration from graffiti, skateboarding and the Nike brand, my work exists as an irreverent stance on the nature of success and therefore failure. One doesn’t have success without failure, and vice versa.

Successfail is an installation comprised of imagery, text, video and sculpture that all work together to form a cohesive attitude I have toward these binaries. Failure and success, black and white, good and bad, clean and dirty are purposefully integrated to offer the viewer a chance to question their own sense of success and failure. I hope to encourage reflection as well as uncover misconceptions surrounding these topics.

During my process I have shifted views around failure and success, but more importantly, I have come to the understanding that failure is a means to success, but success is not enough, repeated success is what we can identify as mastery. Mastery, then, is perhaps the greater goal, not simply success.