FORE is a collection of 14 years worth of image/ word associations--original stencil illustrations coupled with four-letter words. The pairings range from the pedantic and apparent to the obtusely personal--nodding to pop culture, politics and adolescent vulgarity. Collectively, these illustrations and text form FORE--an invitation to vandalism and creativity masquerading as a 26-word homage to 21st century youth that moonlights as a picture dictionary trying to make it as a handmade artist book.

FORE capitalizes on an unreasonable 21st century expectation for the fast-food packaging and commodification of everything. FORE caters to consumer culture's compulsion to "collect" as a bid to buy into exclusivity. Stenciling--an expression that once, by its very nature, invited and inspired propagation via counterfeiting--has become a commodity to be captured, tagged, authenticated and sold to the loft with the fattest wallet. Why bother with concepts, sketches and razor-worn fingertips when you can just flip thru FORE, undo a couple of snap-rings, compose some pre-fabricated ideas and apathetically soak your composition with spray paint. It's all of the creative rush with none of the messy process. FORE is graffiti's Hallmark greeting card.

Less cynically, FORE is an experiment in democratic design. Who needs a 3 dollar shirt or bag stained with ten cents worth of someone else's ink for $40 when you can get 26 designs with which to customize whatever you have around for the price of two mass-produced $40 shirts? Underdeveloped drafting skills or a lack of studio space shouldn't impede production. FORE is an invitation to tools. It's a conduit for the crossover from consumption to creation.

Collect it or exploit it. Exploiting FORE defies its collectivity and collecting it stifles its exploitability. Exploiting FORE creatively ensures its eventual deterioration as an object. It wears, rips, frays and stains like most other tools. Its destruction becomes an artifact of the personality of its owner. Pampered as an object and untouched by paint or pens, FORE persists as a signed and numbered picture dictionary, but that existence too becomes a telling mirror of its owner.