AWARE COFFEE

Aware coffee shop - las vegas, nevada

20’ x 15’

Spray paint and acrylic paint thinned out with fluid medium on flat white interior basecoat.

When I met the owners of this coffee shop, they had expressed their concept behind their brand: ‘mono-no-aware’ a term used in Japanese culture signifying the deep feeling or pathos of things. ‘Mono” means thing’ or ‘things’; ‘aware’ means ‘feeling’ or sentiment, and the particle ‘no’ indicates something an object possesses.

As I checked in with myself to see what this phrase might mean to me, I eventually stumbled upon the idea of using clouds as an object. When I think of clouds, in my mind they appear as a fixed image - a symbol. Yet observing clouds in the sky turns out to be an entirely different experience - I see them constantly moving, shifting and changing. I eventually came to a realization that this “object” in my mind behaved differently than what I saw out in the world.

Thus the challenge with this mural was to capture these two seemingly contrasting perceptions into a visual piece and explore the relationship between the two. I decided on using a symbolic form of the cloud (in this case traditional Japanese cloud patterns) and gestured at my observation of its “natural” behavior using color and form.