two different words in one

Champ/Chump, 2015
Ink on paper

I used to work at a restaurant as a server. The waiters and waitresses would write customers food orders and I would read those orders and bring the food to their tables. In the process, I got to see different styles of handwriting and a few of them were messy enough that I would sometimes misread what was written. One night while misreading an order, an idea came to me of intentionally writing phrases in bad form so that a word may look like another, also making its meaning change. I still remember the moment of discovery well, and the feelings of surprise and excitement that came with it.

For this project I had wrote a series of three phrases:

* I’m a champ/chump
* happy/Sorry to love
* Life rocks/sucks

What I like about the project is how it shows a very small difference between one thought (or feeling) and another, not just visually but in terms of thinking. I find it also shows how important our interpretation can be when it determines how we see things.