Before becoming known for his gallery-like listening room installations and custom-built high-end audio equipment, Devon Turnbull’s creative moniker, Ojas, took form through graffiti, DJing, and screenprinted clothing. Turnbull grew up in Suffolk County, New York, until his parents moved to a transcendental meditation community in Iowa when he was 11. At 17, he left to study audio engineering in Seattle and, in 1999, moved to New York City. During this formative period in the city’s downtown scene, Turnbull met the crew surrounding the newly opened Alife store while DJing at a party on the Lower East Side. Over the next few years, he immersed himself in graffiti, forming friendships with prominent writers of the era, including Earsnot IRAK and Katsu. In 2003, Turnbull co-founded Nom de Guerre, an influential Manhattan-based brand that would serve as a launching pad for his entry into the world of audiophile culture. In this feature, Katsu and Ojas take a trip down memory lane for Issue 12 of Living Proof magazine.
Full segment featured in Issue 12 of Living Proof Magazine.
I’d say the core root of our relationship is New York City. I met you at a time when you had just started to get your footing in the city. Both of us were figuring things out. I had just arrived at school. I met you through Jamie, who said, “You’ve got to meet this guy Devon. You’ve always had a very strong sense of culture. Not trend, but an understanding of what’s emerging. You had a keen sense of what was about to happen, and you really opened my eyes to a lot of what was happening downtown. We were both students, unestablished. We didn’t know who we were yet, or what our work would become.
When we met, I was into graphic design, but I had no formal education in it. It was just a hobby, because I was already an audio engineer. I had completed an audio engineering program in Seattle and was finishing my bachelor’s in liberal arts at The New School in New York. By that point, I’d been to multiple schools. Community college in Seattle, the Art Institute of Seattle, Five Towns College on Long Island, and then The New School. I was just trying to finish somehow.
We met at a fucked-up stage of our lives, but creatively. T-shirt culture was the pinnacle of downtown New York at that moment. It was graffiti and graphic tees. That was the scene.
Totally. Back then, graphic tees made by creatives were everything. Most of us weren’t established in any other way. We were just making T-shirts. I had been hand-embroidering shirts for fun. I was obsessed with Antipop Consortium and wanted to be part of that music world. The Alife guys told me to bring some shirts in. I brought four or five, and Beans from Antipop borrowed one for a show. That moment changed everything for me. I had never been encouraged to do anything visual before. I only knew Photoshop and Illustrator because I was forced to take one graphic design class in audio school. By the time we met, I’d been designing for maybe six months. I built a screen-printing press in my apartment and printed shirts, drying them on clotheslines everywhere.
Graphic-tee culture then was about invention. To stand out, you had to introduce a new trick, either in the graphic or the printing. For you, it was printing designs inside the shirt. The RIP Tupac shirt with the “Thug Life” tattoo barely visible through the fabric became iconic. That creativity was what drew Alife to your work. It was pure experimentation. There were so many brands downtown at the time. Subware, Alife, Union, Supreme, back when Supreme was still just a skate brand, before hype existed. When we collaborated, you really helped push my graffiti forward. We worked on the drippy ink concept together. You were a mentor to me.
Those early shirts were made in the most analog way possible. You drew on acetate. We burned screens directly from that. No scanning, no computers. Everything was slow and handmade. That was the energy downtown at the time. Everyone was working that way.
There were no labels back then. Nobody asked about politics, identity, or taking stances. We were just part of a melting pot. Graffiti writers built identities through folklore and rumor. That mystery gave subcultures real weight. Back then, if your tag showed up in the background of a commercial or a movie still, you were hyped. Now it’s lawsuits. The culture was purer. Every subculture today has to battle scale and speed.
Yeah, totally.
After those early years, your practice expanded beyond T-shirts. OJAS became installation-based. You traveled, collaborated, and eventually co-founded Nom de Guerre, one of the first downtown stores to bridge graphic-tee culture into elevated fashion.
Nom de Guerre started in a basement off Broadway. The space was damp, musky, and cheap. People mistook it for a subway entrance. Rent was around $1,800 a month. We projected the logo on the wall and hand-painted it. Everything was held together with tape and bubblegum, but we were trying to create something elevated with the tools we had.
Photography by Sam McKenna
Read the full interview in Living Proof Magazine Issue 12, available on the Living Proof Patreon and Online Shop.
