The 📝Playboy Collage is a framed collage built from the last banker's box of 📝My Vintage Playboy Collection — the issues nobody claimed at the 📝Playboy Perusing Potluck Party. It took somewhere around thirty or forty hours across reading, tearing, sorting, and composition, and it now hangs in our house.
The selection logic emerged fast and then ran the whole project. What kept pulling my scissors was not the centerfolds but the weirdness at the edges — specifically, how relentlessly technology was sold through sex in those pages. A 1980s digital scanner advertised by showing someone scanning a page of Playboy. A Casio watch with a picture display, marketed with a little black book of women's faces on the screen. Headlines running the same trick: "Does God Have Orgasms?" by Deepak Chopra. Kink-oriented imagery went in too, and was the hardest material to find — Playboy traded in aesthetics rather than appetite, so anything with real edge had to be hunted.
The result is deliberately a portrait of how sex was sold to me in adolescence. Not by Playboy specifically — by that whole ambient imagery, of which Playboy was one supplier among many. Making it became a conscious pass back through those narratives.
The frame is part of the piece. I wanted a floating frame and decided to print one rather than buy it, which made it the first object I modeled on my 📝Bambu Lab X2D with 📝Claude instead of downloading someone else's file. The design brief included the finish: the channel between canvas and frame is packed with women's underwear. That underwear is the leftover from the potluck, where it had served as name tags after the Playboy Mansion chandelier I planned never got bought.
Nothing about this piece is separable from the party that produced it, which is why I like it. The magazines are the ones no one wanted. The frame is stuffed with the name tags no one wore. It is made entirely of leftovers, which means the accident that started the whole thing — a junk bid on a mislisted auction lot — got spent all the way down to zero. I got lost in the making of it in a way I do not often let myself, and the thirty-to-forty-hour figure is honestly a guess, because I stopped counting.