As if the holiday season didn’t already mean a heaving cornucopia of needful things, tattoo master, toy maker, book publisher, and all around art champion Joseph Aloi—known to those in the knowknow as JK5—is generously giving us another thing to lust after. A limited-edition, go-get-it-now-as-time-is-most-definitely-of-the-essence, never-before-seen-til-this-very-moment-gosh-aren’t-you-lucky WATCH.
His extraordinary, face-meltingly beautiful collaboration with Timex is, in an impossibly canny move, a part of the holiday offerings of the perennially chic Barneys Coop.
JK5 and I were so giddy about a new medium for his distinctively bananas yet unfailingly expansive aesthetic that we had a little chat.
What were the challenges inherent in cultivating a design for as specific a canvas as a watch?
The challenge for me was to come up with an interesting, distinctive, and beautiful design for the very small, octagonal face. The shape and form was conducive to a symmetrical design with fluid linework that would just glow with the color choices. The top horizontally reads, “JK5″ and “Barneys,” and the sides which I turned and treated horizontally as well read, “Illuminate,” and the numbers one to nine. On the bottom it says, “Love, Light, Create.” The words that had a function on the watch [like "stop" and "reset"] needed to remain so those got contrasting glyph-like type treatments.
How was the collaborative process and would you work with them again?
They were awesome folks to work with. I had a great dialogue with the Barneys and Timex team about the potential to create and design the anatomy of a watch—actually play with the technology. I liked the idea of seeing my sanskrit/elvish/cholo/sci-fi fonts as the digital time display but I really want to create a new watch form and concept from scratch. Thinking about time as a beating heart.
Wow. That’s near impossible for me to envision how far that could go.
They’re open to collaborate further so we shall see.
OK, being familiar with your process I know you always have this incredibly developed, baroque detailed narrative, a complete backstory for each design. What’s up with this watch?
This ancient traveling scribe of the buddha journeyed to a distant, most conscious, visually lyrical planet of the imagined subconscious future, and returns with this relic of a glowing timepiece. It was selected out of three. Encrypted are the messages “Illuminate time through love, light, and creation.” It is always that time.
Tags: Barneys, Collaborations, JK5, Joseph Aloi, Saved, Tattoo, Timex
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