Jaydan Moore grew up inside a four-generation tombstone business in Antioch, California, that also doubled as a rental storage facility. As a kid he listened in on families making burial arrangements and rummaged through the belongings strangers had left behind in storage units. The work he makes now, fifteen years deep into a single material, comes straight from that early proximity to objects holding the weight of a whole life.
"There's only the material kind of dings and scratches that show how valuable it was to the previous owner," he said. "I think it's a really powerful thing that humanity can do, to deem something valuable, to denote it for memory, for having meaning in somebody's life, and then have that passed on and changed and altered."
He went to California College of the Arts at eighteen, took metals every semester, worked as a bench jeweler on the side, and then went to UW Madison for grad school. There he started researching the trophy as a cultural object, tracing how it moved "from altruism to competition" to the participatory plastic trophies of contemporary childhood. While making trophies out of found tableware in junk shops, he picked up a silver-plated platter and never really put it down.
The choice has stuck partly for ecological reasons. "Fifteen years in, I can still buy a silver-plated platter for cheaper than a sheet of metal," he said. The thrift stores are full of them, mass-produced objects pretending to be more valuable than they are, brass or copper under a thin layer of silver, carrying the marks of however much their owners cared.
When asked about his early resistance to the word "nostalgia," he traced it back to grad school, when the term carried a dirtier charge in the art world. But he's come around to a more layered version of it. "Sometimes I talk to people about being nostalgic for the current moment," he said. "When you're so enjoying something and already knowing that it might pass, that's a type of nostalgia too."
The conversation also looped through Shakespeare on tragedy versus comedy (the comic characters are the ones who figure out what's going on by the end), David Chang on building more failure into a creative practice, and Jaydan's growing pull toward car fabrication and low-rider culture as the next material to explore. Underneath all of it ran the same question his work has always asked: what gets carried forward when an object outlives the person who loved it.
Near the end, riffing on his own trophy research, he landed on a line that worked as a kind of summary. "We're all just figuring it out. We're all still clawing into the dark."