Sunny’s Surplus was a store in Maryland where my parents bought the clothes and camping gear I needed as a Boy Scout. I was fascinated by the various World War II surplus items the store sold and every once in a while, through the late ‘90s, I’d pick something up, like this gas mask.
I made these drawings in 1997, based on some self-portraits I shot for a photography class in college. I incorporated those drawings into a collage on a canvass board that same year and this piece would later inspire my experiments with collage in 2012.