Loyalty to the Past with a Passion to the Present grows out of the belief that “real bands save fans, real fans save bands. (Michael Clifford, 2013)” That reciprocal care, how the things we care about end up caring for us, too, sits at the center of this work. This installation is built from devotion: a large-scale painting dedicated to the wild adventure that was the release of Michael Clifford's first solo song "Cool", surrounded by handmade CD boxes that reference albums, eras, and emotions that have shaped who I am. It’s about holding onto the things that built me while learning how to let them evolve, to let them exist as living parts of my present rather than relics of the past.

The painting serves as a focal point, almost like standing in front of a stage, an image of admiration transformed into atmosphere. Around it, the CD boxes act as containers for memory and time, each one holding evidence of an ongoing relationship with music, fandom, and selfhood. Together they form a system of remembrance, where repetition and rhythm echo both the experience of listening and the persistence of care.

Much of this work revolves around distance, the space between myself and the relics I hold close, between the viewer and the intimacy of my attachments. It’s about the tension between preservation and release: the desire to keep something safe, and the realization that holding on too tightly can sometimes mean holding it back. That’s where the phrase “loyalty to the past, with a passion to the present” takes shape. It’s a way of honoring where I came from without getting trapped there, of showing the messy overlap between growth and devotion, failure and persistence.

By placing finished, unfinished, and reimagined works together, I emphasize that evolution and redirection are not signs of loss, but of continuation. For me, memory is never clean, it’s layered, complicated, full of starts and stops, highs and lows. My work relies on the physical, the painting, the boxes, the collected media, as proof that these feelings ever existed. Loyalty to the Past with a Passion to the Present becomes a space to hold them all: what was, what still is, and what continues to change.

-Meraki Gardner