Avery Tien’s Rockstar Dreams @ Bumbershoot ‘25

Rockstar Dreams and the Birth of GRAFT

Rockstar Dreams by Avery Tien, shown at Bumbershoot’s Fashion District on August 30–31, 2025, marked an early spark for GRAFT — my ongoing exploration of Seattle’s sustainable fashion scene through a Northwestern Gothic lens, for lack of a betterterm.

The project began in mid-2024, though it only recently found its name and at least part of it’s vision. GRAFT sits somewhere between documentation and folk horror — a study of transformation, the afterlife of material, and the rituals of making. It’s about what happens when something is reassembled rather than remade, when memory becomes texture.

Avery’s work, with its surreal reuse of common objects — scales made from keys, ties, small relics of the everyday turned into ornaments — embodied what GRAFT aims to trace: how utility turns uncanny, and how creation itself can feel like possession.

Much of my work revolves around compulsion — the pull to photograph what feels slightly off, visually or emotionally. GRAFT extends that instinct into a larger world, one where clothes, people, and buildings share the same ghost.

More fragments and field notes from GRAFT to come in the new year.