Art • Creative Direction • Leadership

Oliphaunt

“Yes, mystery art delivered… Now the only mystery is why you weren’t an art collector earlier.”

— InsideHook, Mystery Repeating Itself

ROLE

Concept, creative direction, membership model, artist curation, product development, identity, editorial narrative, packaging, print and digital design, sales, and marketing.

CONTEXT

OCCULTER, New York

PROJECT OVERVIEW

I conceived and directed Oliphaunt as a quarterly object subscription produced by the OCCULTER creative collective. The project brought artists and members together through limited-edition objects, printed clues, and a recurring exchange organized around the seasons.

Oliphaunt encouraged a more conscientious relationship with the things we own. Each object existed somewhere between art, craft, and utility, carrying the identity of its maker and the anticipation created around its arrival.

MEMBERSHIP EXPERIENCE

Membership began with an induction package containing a welcome letter and numbered badge establishing each subscriber’s Member ID.

A printed newsletter followed every month, offering clues and dates without revealing the next object. Four “Oliphaunts” arrived each year—one near every equinox and solstice—each created by a different artist, signed, and numbered with the recipient’s Member ID.

The sequence turned a subscription into an unfolding narrative: initiation, speculation, discovery, and exchange.

MANIFESTO

To our animal, some things are mere sustenance. But we’ve evolved. As global consumers, we now respond to fashion, availability, and cost to determine the value of things. And as post-industrialists, our fetish objects have little intrinsic worth and are mainly gateways to an ever-expanding load of ethereal stuff. It’s difficult to reckon how we’ll physically and psychologically adapt to the exponential developments spawned by our own intellect. But we can be certain that our relationship to objects and people will continue to be redefined.

Fortunately, we’re sentient and instinctive. From our very beginnings, we’ve created artifacts to help us cope with the uncanny. The venerable human fingerprint continues to coalesce our intellect and emotional temperament into objects of self-reflection. And we’ve seen reciprocity and the human bond transmute the crafted thing from ordinary commodity to myth-making tool.

Despite their elusive quantifiability, we maintain that physical skill and artfulness are keystones of cultural identity. This is a marvelous mystery: that we would be modern and still wittingly cherish the transformative power of objects, as if to say, “A thing is not always just a thing.”

THIS IS THE BEAST IN THE ROOM. THIS IS OLIPHAUNT.