The Abiss Brand Story: The City Is the Source Material
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The Abiss Brand Story: The City Is the Source Material
Every brand has an origin story. Most of them are the same story told with different details — a founder who loved fashion, a gap in the market, a desire to create something authentic. These stories are marketing constructs. They exist to give a brand a human face without revealing anything specific enough to be held accountable.
This isn't that story.
Abiss Apparel exists because of a specific relationship between a specific person and a specific city. The work comes from that relationship directly — not from a market analysis, not from a mood board, not from studying what was selling. From the city. From what it looks like when a system built to organize human movement starts to fail. From the visual language of infrastructure under stress. From the collision between the official and the unofficial, the sanctioned and the subversive, the sign that tells you what to do and the print that asks you to think.
The city is the source material. Everything else follows from that.
Where It Comes From
Los Angeles is a city designed around the management of movement. Freeways, surface streets, traffic signals, signage — the entire physical infrastructure of LA exists to move people from one place to another as efficiently as possible while preventing them from colliding with each other in the process.
The visual language of that infrastructure is everywhere and invisible. Stop signs. Speed limit signs. No Left Turn. One Way. Do Not Enter. These objects line every street in the city. You've looked at them thousands of times without seeing them — processed at the edge of attention as you navigate, obeyed without thought, forgotten immediately.
What happens when you actually look at them?
A No Left Turn sign is an aluminum panel with retroreflective sheeting designed to return light toward its source. The graphic on it — the arrow, the red circle, the diagonal slash — is designed for maximum legibility at minimum conscious engagement. It tells you what you cannot do with the authority of the state behind it. It is official. It is regulatory. It is designed to be obeyed and forgotten.
It is also a physical object with specific material properties, a specific history, a specific presence in the urban environment that nobody owns. When you take that object out of its context — off the pole, out of the intersection, into the studio — something changes. The authority is still present. But it's available now. Available to be questioned, subverted, transformed. Available to become something else without losing what it was.
The Process
Abiss operates two verticals from the same studio and the same practice.
The first is the apparel line — heavyweight screen-printed tees, hoodies, windbreakers, joggers. These are the accessible entry point to the brand. The fabric weights are chosen specifically because the screen-printed graphics require a surface that supports them correctly. The graphics come from the same visual language as the fine art work — glitch-influenced, digitally corrupted, the aesthetics of systems under stress rendered in physical ink. You wear the city. You wear the failure mode. You wear the thing that polished digital culture is trying to hide.
The second is the fine art serigraphy practice — limited edition hand-pulled prints and 1/1 originals on found object substrates. This is where the work gets most specific. A three-layer CMY process serigraph on a reflective aluminum No Left Turn sign is not a product. It's a document of a specific collision between the city's authority and an artist's mark. The sign carries its history into the work — its years in the urban environment, its function as a regulatory object, the specific reflective quality of its surface that makes CMY ink behave differently on it than on any other material.
The reduction serigraph process — where the same substrate is permanently altered by each successive color layer until the final state is unrepeatable and irreversible — takes this to its logical conclusion. There is exactly one Beyond the Sea. Not because we decided to make only one. Because the process could only have produced one. The object exists in a state that cannot be recovered or reconstructed. The city gave us the substrate. The process made it permanent.
The Visual Language
The glitch aesthetic that runs through all of Abiss's work — apparel and fine art — is not a visual style chosen for its currency. It's a direct response to the conditions of contemporary life.
We live in a moment of total digital mediation. Every image is processed, compressed, optimized. Every communication passes through algorithms designed to make the technology invisible. The seamless surface of digital culture is the dominant visual condition of the present moment — perfect, frictionless, designed to be consumed without friction and forgotten without residue.
The glitch is what happens when that seamlessness fails. The JPEG compressed beyond its capacity. The video signal interrupted mid-frame. The data file rendered incorrectly by the wrong application. These failures make the process visible. They reveal the machinery underneath the perfect surface. They show you that the seamlessness is constructed, that underneath it there are systems of approximation and error correction that are always one bad bit flip away from producing something completely unexpected.
There is something honest about the glitch. It doesn't pretend. It shows you what's actually there.
Rendering that visual language in screen-printed ink — one of the oldest reproduction technologies still in active use — creates a specific kind of meaning. The digital artifact made permanent in physical ink. The failure mode of advanced technology documented by a craft process that predates all of it. The city's infrastructure as the substrate on which that documentation happens.
This is what Abiss is about. It's specific enough to be accountable. It's rooted deeply enough to produce work that couldn't come from anywhere else.
The Name
Abiss. Not abyss — the standard English spelling. Abiss. The deliberate misspelling is its own kind of glitch. The word you expect, rendered incorrectly. Recognizable but wrong. The familiar made strange by a single character's displacement.
The abyss as a concept — the void, the depth beyond depth, the place where systems run out of answers — is the space the work inhabits. Between the official and the unofficial. Between the digital and the physical. Between the sign's authority and the print's question. Between the city's management of movement and the artist's refusal to be managed.
The misspelling marks the brand as something that operates in that space. Not quite what you expect. Close enough to recognize. Different enough to make you look again.
Where It's Going
Abiss is an LA brand at an early stage of its development. The apparel line is live and shipping. The fine art practice is producing work that belongs in galleries and is building toward gallery representation in LA's Arts District — the neighborhood that has been the epicenter of the street art and fine art crossover for decades.
The pricing reflects where we are now — apparel at accessible streetwear price points, fine art serigraphs from $50 to $850 for limited editions and higher for 1/1 originals. These prices will change as the work gains the institutional recognition it's building toward. The collectors who understand this are acquiring now.
The work is being made in a home studio in a city that provides everything the practice needs — the found objects, the visual language, the cultural context, the underground scene that takes this kind of work seriously. LA is not incidental to what Abiss makes. LA is what Abiss makes.
The city is the source material. Every tee, every serigraph, every print on every found object substrate is a document of a specific relationship between a specific practice and a specific place.
That relationship is what the brand is built on. It's specific enough that no one else can replicate it. It's deep enough that the work it produces will compound over time.
This is the beginning.
Shop the collection and view available fine art works at abissapparel.com.
Abiss Apparel is an LA-based streetwear and fine art brand producing heavyweight screen-printed apparel and limited edition hand-pulled serigraphs from $50 to $850. Shop at abissapparel.com and follow @abissapparel.