I’m cutting my favorite shirt in half. Join Me. ALLRISK

Greetings, friends, when was the last time you decided to fix something? How about the last time you destroyed something. Did you feel a sense of freedom after each moment? How were they different?

So today is a very important day, because it’s June 6th, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of ALLRISK. And what that means is similar to other ideas about “if you love something give it away”,”If it doesn’t please you, it’s distracting”…sort of pruning…it’s like tending plants.

So Today on the Internet I was using Twitter microblogging service, and I have that set up so that it pings everywhere, and today I proposed an action, because lots of things come out of action, like value.

Value comes out of action, and memory comes out of action, importance comes out of action. So today is important because approximately a year ago I took some risks and made some plans to change my life…to take risk for myself, and go after relationships or to take a flight that I didn’t even know if it would potentially happen and it ended up happening.

So this is about cutting up a shirt. This is my favorite shirt. It’s the shirt that I was wearing when I did the “Best Dressed Man competition” in San Francisco. This is also the shirt that I wore when I saw Maya about a year ago on that trip I was talking about to Venice.

I received a letter from her today and it was great. And it’s about not knowing what path you’re taking, being true to yourself and making decisions.

So I’m going to make this shirt better by cutting it in half.

And the reason that I’m cutting in half is because I already like it, and I think by performing this action something is going to change here. I’m going to use this shirt in a project, I’m going to make this shirt better. It fits with my Open Fashion concepts and makes a lot of sense to do it, and it’s sort of taking apart something that you value…and you can add more value to it by doing an action to it.

So there it is, it’s cut in half.

So now I suppose we can do some other modifications, but essentially everything that is associated with this, the memories, the actions, can be re-told and shared through it’s creation through its perceived destruction. But by actually destroying this object in some regard, I’m actually giving it an opportunity to have a new life.

So here we go, it’s in another piece here, the collar is already cut in half, so I guess we’ll do another modification here.

There we go it’s in two pieces, and I can easily make it three by simply undoing the buttons. So I’m going to keep modifying this shirt.

And I hope you can all understand the great number of metaphors that this is embodying both personally and for you, the viewer.

So there we are…ALL RISK.

Published by Pete Ippel

Pete Ippel, the son of a dancer and a musician, was born in Oak Park, Illinois and has been surrounded by the arts since birth. He moved to Morris, Illinois in 1989 and started to participate in athletics rather than dance. After high school, Pete attended Cornell University where he received a BA in psychology and a BFA in photo / digital art making. He continued to follow his sporting dreams in the high jump, which culminated in a school record leap of 7 feet 1/2 inch in 2001. In May 2004 he attained an MFA degree in the New Genres department of the San Francisco Art Institute. Presently Pete is a practicing artist whose work is in numerous private collections and has been exhibited in New York, California, and internationally. Mr. Ippel resides in Working Artists Ventura, a sustainable artist community in southern California. In addition, he teaches art, is a web developer, an active blogger, and still high jumps from time to time. As a passionate problem solver and a pragmatic optimist, Pete’s art and his life are full of exciting challenges.

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2 Comments

  1. I think it is very hard to let go of things or change things we own that give us pleasure. I admire your courage! It reminds me of the practice of a Native American group who once a year held a “give away.” Each year a highly respected and appreciated member of the community was awarded gifts from all the other members of the community. The condition was that the gift had to be your most prized possession.

    I think it is easy to give to those we deem worthy. The New Testament however suggests that we give to all alike – just as rain falls on both the just and the unjust. ALLRISK involved.

    I’m looking forward to the artful transformation of what once was in the form of your favorite shirt.

  2. Thank you for your kind words, Sarah, and explaining the Native American traditions. I assure you I will continue to move forward in my explorations of ALLRISK and how the perception is constantly evolving. I appreciate that you say the “form” of my favorite shirt. That’s a huge point especially when thinking about energy in the scientific *and* phenomenological sense.

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