UNTIED

As I prepared to attempt a thru hike on the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 2016, I faced an interesting prospect; I was about to deliberately jobless, homeless and for all intents and purposes, untethered from a largely capitalistic, vocation-centric life of which I had been an active participant since I was 15 years old. This was an opportunity to examine my own insecure relationship regarding vocational purpose but also of the traditions of male provider-ship and the covertly malignant effects of wrapping one’s identity around what one does for “work”. The neckties in this piece are a collection of both my own and those anonymously owned and then discarded at the local secondhand store. They hang loosely, untied, cascading down and over one another, but all within the bounds of a gilded frame, who’s contours are a digitally simplified 3D-routing of the topography of the Appalachian Trail.