I recently had the opportunity to create an in-store installation for a pair of custom shoes I created. What follows is an outline of my process from the initial conversation with the shop owner all the way through the opening night of the installation.

I met the owner of the Nashville shop The PSV Store while exploring a local event called Artville. He was familiar with my work designing custom shoes through a mutual friend and expressed interest in having me create an installation designed around a pair of my shoes in his shop for a local art crawl in two and a half weeks. I was initially hesitant because most of the work I do is commissioned, which means I don't have a lot of work readily available for such a quick turnaround, but then I remembered I had one special pair that might be a good fit, so I said yes and the brainstorming commenced.

Below is the initial concept I sent the shop owner. I put this together the same night as our conversation and sent it to him saying this was my general idea. I wanted to gauge where his head was at and if he was cool with me turning an entire corner of his mostly white walled shop a radiant blue. 

This initial concept was pretty basic because I didn't have a budget at all and I wasn't sure what sort of resources I would be able to gather to make this thing happen. I knew if anything I could buy some paint and a poster and at least have something to show. The shop owner was stoked about this idea and was excited to move forward.

For this project I had very limited resources when it came to money. Because it was such a last-minute decision to create this installation, I hadn't been able to account for this expense in my family budget, so I was left to figure out how to create something cool and captivating with what I could find, a bucket of paint (the one thing I knew I had to buy), and whatever me and my circle of friends had access to. 

Initially the shop owner communicated that he had blue paint that I could use, but when he sent me pictures of the color he had I knew it wasn't going to work. I had a very specific shade of blue in mind. It needed to be vibrant and really draw the viewer into the piece from across the room. I used a book by the artist Virgil Abloh as the inspiration for the shoes and I knew I had to use a shade of blue that matched the color of the book as closely as possible.

Once I secured the paint I needed to find a way to get the poster printed. I reached out to a friend of mine to see where he got his posers printed, and I was also curious if he could use his Cricut machine to cut vinyl wall decals. He never answered my question about posters, but he said yes to being able to make wall decals. So I pivoted to a new concept.

Once I landed on the final concept and secured the resources needed, it was time to start the installation process. For this part I called on the help of some friends. We had two nights to work. We painted the first night and installed the lettering and images on night two.

On the first night of painting I asked one of my friends who helped me paint to also film a time lapse so we could have video assets to utilize in our social media marketing of the installation and the event. Below are some of the screenshots we took from the video and how I used them as social media posts.

I'm very pleased with the final results. My goal was mostly to get this project done and out into the world, and me and my team accomplished that.