I made these shirts as a part of a 4.301 (Foundations in the Visual Arts) project dealing with body extension. My concept for the project was to extend my thoughts to a physical form. More specifically, it was to make visible some of the paranoias/anxieties I feel in certain social situations, and disarm these feelings by making others around me aware of them. The hope was that this would relieve me from having to think about whatever feeling was printed on my shirt. The four situations/paranoias I made shirts for are:

• Going into a bank, and being afraid of being perceived as a robber, and furthermore having the behavioral oddities caused by this paranoia actually perceived as uneasiness and anxiety concerning the "robbery."
• Being in a conversation and speaking too much about myself.
• Being alone, or feeling alone in a crowd.
• Talking to an attractive person, and fearing that they feel that I am hitting on them or soliciting a relationship, since I am in a relationship already.

The shirts were made using print-on iron-on transfer sheets, ironed on to blank shirts I got at the Goodwill. I chose red shirts, since red is the color most often associated with emotion, and then used a simple pallet of black white and red (and some post-iron-on applied glow-in-the-dark paint), to make simple cartoons. I also explanatory text on the back, both to clarify the meaning of the graphic on the front and to inform people on both sides of me. The asterisk on the cartoon serves to inform the viewer that the graphic has meaning, as well as sometimes soliciting a question from the viewer ("What does that asterisk mean?") which then forces a verbal acknowledgement of the feeling and thus its further exposure.

In the performance, I wore all four shirts at once, with shirt for the anxiety I felt the most at the time on the outside, and then changing the order as the situation demanded. Click on the picture below to view the Quicktime video of the project in a new window, or right click the image and save the link target to your computer.