November 22, 2023
And so, they fell out—the rotten, the tiered, the neglected. One by one, they felt each other go, roots untangling with unease, leaving a void to rest in peace. An unguarded gap, this vulnerable vacuum. Collect them like flower seeds and store them with fragile ease.
Time takes away teeth. Instead of growing new ones in their former place, the ones society watched depart are forced to flourish elsewhere, outside the structure and the all-too-ordinary stereotype, only to leave again. The second time was the last attempt. Teeth don't grow twice. This time, they’re not coming back to confirm what seems to condemn them.
These overexposed photographs tell the tale of an underexposed side of society. Fries, cats, and credit cards camouflage Regina Padilla Saez and artist 9’s characters.
She’s a woman without formal education. He’s a graffiti artist against the grain, against the law. She taught herself to write and read at the age of 17. He entered the scene in 1991. She worked as a housewife to sustain herself. Through the pursuit of his art, he faced constant confrontations. They both turned to drugs. They meet in self-sufficiency and addiction; the failure of social integration, the vows that were valid to anybody but them; the eyes that always looked the other way.
There is pleasure in the pain, and inevitably, there is beauty in what convention would refer to as the beast. By using fashion as his force of freedom from formalities, Clears Bow seeks to push the limits of traditional storytelling. These images, produced in collaboration with Fuckyougrillz and photographed by Alba Robbins, not only glamorize what was lost but also highlight what should never have gone missing. The outcome dares us to question what we consume and what stereotypes we subscribe to.
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