Intern extraordinaire Michael Davenport interviews Brandon Alston, aka Fresh, to learn more about the artist’s creative practice and the work featured in this year’s Young Contemporaries 2024 exhibition.
When walking into an art gallery or a museum, clothes are not typically something one expects to see. But clothes are just the thing that you’ll see when visiting the Halsey Institute’s Young Contemporaries 2024 exhibition. In the South Gallery is a series of three works by artist Brandon Alston, aka Fresh. They are three hoodies from the Livelihood Project, a project in wearable sound that he worked on in collaboration with Charleston native and musician, Mike Live, or the stylized MiKE L!VE.
Fresh is a Theater Major at the College of Charleston with a concentration in costume design. He is also the owner of Fresh Prince Fits Design, @fresh.prince.fits on Instagram, a sustainable clothing brand of custom designs made from vintage and thrifted fabrics. The three works are selections from the Livelihood Project, each based on a song by MiKE L!VE: Sock with a Hole, Pray for North Charleston, and Mike Tesla. Each piece has a QR code that links to the song when scanned.
Every artist has a different process. From ideation to conception to execution, no two artists work the same. This is especially true across mediums. When it came to conception for the Livelihood Project, Mike had lots of grand ideas about what he wanted the hoodies to do, with no pause to consider whether or not they would be possible. As Fresh told me, much of what Mike wanted to do would be difficult logistically, but since he was not being constrained by the “rules” of sewing and costuming as it were, it pushed Fresh to be creative and make those things work.
The medium of clothing, specifically hoodies, influences the message and impact of these works. Each piece serves the message it originates from, the same way that a costume serves the purpose of the narrative. The hoodies were a deliberate choice. There is an association between hoodies and Black youth and ideas of gangs and violence. MiKE L!VE is not a Black man, but he chose to go out of his way to speak on an issue that disproportionately affects the Black population of Charleston and North Charleston, and this was meaningful to Fresh. As he told me, the Black community should not have to lift themselves out of oppression; everyone should lift them out.
Remarkably, despite a work like Pray for North Charleston, a piece about gentrification and gun violence, Fresh’s goal was never social change. The audience that he and Mike shared already knew about these issues of gentrification, race, and violence. What Brandon wanted to achieve was a change in himself as an artist; it’s what everyone working on the Livelihood Project wanted to achieve.
If his work wasn’t about enacting social change, what does Fresh want visitors of the Halsey to take away from his work? As an artist myself who wants people to be changed by my work, Fresh’s answer struck me deeply. “There is nothing to take away from it. Nothing specific, at least. There is nothing real to look for, there is nothing to find. I didn’t put anything in there. None of it has an intrinsic, inherent meaning. Whatever it forces you to think about is what people should take away from it.”
An artist’s work is their own. An artist’s community is their own. But when you reach across mediums and genres, you create things greater than you could have on your own. They become more than hoodies. I leave you with a final piece of advice from Fresh: if there isn’t an audience, make one.