Empty warehouse. Tactical rig. Red straps.
Factory Settings is four frames shot inside the Global Mall at the Crossings - formerly Hickory Hollow Mall, once the largest and highest-grossing mall in Tennessee, opened in 1978 and reduced to a handful of tenants by the 2010s before Metro Nashville bought the 1.1-million-square-foot property in 2022 for redevelopment. Caught in that long in-between stretch - stacked metal panels chalked with numbers, scaffolding, columns of cardboard boxes, nothing moving, no signage up yet. The Nashville artist works a black tactical chest rig over a black tee, bright red logo straps hanging from black cargo pants, and blue-tinted frames catching the overhead light. He posted from around that stretch, quoting O.R. Melling: "To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both..." (view the post)
There is no arc to it - four stances in one room. A dead-on stare from the middle of the open floor; arms crossed against a stack of panels with his eyes cutting sideways; mid-stride through a bay with the red straps swinging; one hand up on a tower of boxes, looking back down the lens.
The chest rig is a recurring costume. Fabric Of The Universe, the Los Angeles techwear label whose cyberpunk vests and harnesses turn up across the catalogue - a flooded underpass, an Assault Ops stage - builds the kind of strapped, armored silhouette worn here to walk a mall that was, for the moment, nobody's - once Tennessee's biggest, now a shell waiting on a redevelopment plan, just chalk marks and bare concrete.
The last frame poses him beside a tall column of stacked boxes, one arm raised to rest a hand on the top one.
What "Factory Settings" means
A factory reset strips a device back to how it shipped - nothing installed, nothing personal, everything default. The shoot photographs that state as a place: a mall that once held 249 stores, back down to bare concrete and chalk marks, one figure standing in it kitted for a job that is not there. Red is a warning color before it is anything else. Cut the straps in it, hang them off the rig, and the frame starts to read like a sign telling the empty room to keep back.
SEE ALL 4 PHOTOS FROM THE SHOOT HERE
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