Meet the Four Artists Behind GQ’s First-Ever Digital Art Drop

Can you unpack some of the graphics that went into these digital collages? 

Change Is Good made me think a lot about tension. Very personal experiences of joy and loss have been a big part of my life the last few years, so the idea of visualizing those emotions through intensely contrasting elements, colors, and techniques was important to me. I also wanted to explore how I could utilize every medium I know how to work with in this project. There are 15-plus years’ worth of my photography you can find throughout these pieces, hand-drawn images, revisited elements from old personal projects that felt right to revive, and a small amount of my own AI-generated visuals made specifically for this project. Throughout the collages you’ll find super colorful vibrance and a celebration of life and nature, flowers, trees, skies, suns, humanity. You’ll also find moments of darkness, gloom, cobwebs, grime, cold digital voids. I guess I like the honesty I feel in smashing all of this together. It feels very real to me right now; feels very alive, even the bleak moments.

How has Chicago—its communities, its physical and cultural structures—impacted your work? 

So much of my Chicago experience was shaped in the early-mid 2000s by my relationships with Benjamin Edgar and Virgil Abloh and our work together on The Brilliance!, a blog we started together in 2005. Being in the Chicago suburbs at the time, we were all young kids just completely fascinated by the music, culture, and art of this city, the world, and the internet. Both of them really set the stage for what I saw as important here or why I take notice of things I might have otherwise not appreciated quite as much. I mean, it sounds kind of wild to say, but Virgil really made so many kids care about Mies van der Rohe who probably wouldn’t have cared. He literally inspired kids to get in their cars and drive one-and-a-half hours to fucking Plano, Illinois, to take selfies in the Farnsworth House…. I just, ha, I don’t know—I love that. It’s such a young, “now” way he managed to inspire a generation to care. What a master of juxtaposition he was. “Blending scenes,” as Benjamin likes to say, is such a great way to consider Chicago. This big, beautiful, chaotic, harsh, historic city in the middle of America. I love that. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.