Found Raps On Silk (2025)
Inkjet printed on 100% mulberry silk, 25 x 41 in (63.5 x 104 cm)
Found Raps On Silk continues Shirt's ongoing interest in how cultural material is circulated and what gets preserved, or mostly not, in the process. The work is a screenshot of a tweet the artist saved for years, printed on densely woven pongee silk. The tweet, by writer and MIT professor Joshua Bennett, shares a poem by the author James Tate that was discovered in Tate's typewriter after his death. In 2021, before knowing any of this context, Shirt saved this tweet and then recorded himself rapping the words verbatim for an audio work titled Rap On Found Tweet. For an exhibition at Kunstverein Leipzig in 2025, the screenshot was printed onto archival silk and hung alongside two pairs of headphones playing that original audio recording.
Additional photos available at request
Inkjet printed on 100% mulberry silk, 25 x 41 in (63.5 x 104 cm)
Found Raps On Silk continues Shirt's ongoing interest in how cultural material is circulated and what gets preserved, or mostly not, in the process. The work is a screenshot of a tweet the artist saved for years, printed on densely woven pongee silk. The tweet, by writer and MIT professor Joshua Bennett, shares a poem by the author James Tate that was discovered in Tate's typewriter after his death. In 2021, before knowing any of this context, Shirt saved this tweet and then recorded himself rapping the words verbatim for an audio work titled Rap On Found Tweet. For an exhibition at Kunstverein Leipzig in 2025, the screenshot was printed onto archival silk and hung alongside two pairs of headphones playing that original audio recording.
Additional photos available at request