F1RST T1ME treats rap as an artistic method across media: sampling, repetition, circulation, and recontextualization. His work operates through appropriation and redistribution, collapsing distinctions between merchandise and artwork, retail and performance, authorship and persona. 

In his first solo exhibition, WORTHLESS MARKET #1, the artist extends this logic into a field of garments. WORTHLESS MARKET #1 assembles 1,111 second-hand printed T-shirts sourced from vintage bulk. They range from luxury fashion and political campaign merch to corporate uniforms, church retreats, athletic triumphs, and the cryptic misprint. The garments arrive preloaded with past lives: campaigns already lost, companies bankrupt, victories past. 

Across this accumulation of discarded declarations, ideologies, and affiliations, F1RST T1ME introduces a single intervention. The overprinted word WORTHLESS in clear plastisol ink hovers above the original image without cancelling it. The word reads differently on every fabric: glossy on one, jagged on another, nearly invisible on a third, loud on the fourth. It behaves like a caption imposed after the fact, destabilizing the original context without erasing its first life. Each shirt becomes a site of argument. The contradiction remains legible. On the back, the argument is signed by the artist. Each garment carries F1RST T1ME’s logo, a clockface reduced to a single circled 1. 

All 1,111 T-shirts are priced at $11. Each garment is numbered, from 1 to 1,111. 

The uniform price flattens hierarchy. Luxury, loyalty, and belief enter the same field of exchange and value. Only the subtler currencies of taste, irony, conviction, and a hint of nostalgia remain. 

The racks structure a series of choices. Hands move through fabric and ink—pausing, selecting, rejecting. A logo resurfaces from adolescence. A slogan registers as embarrassment. A church retreat reads as irony. Judgment accumulates across the room.

WORTHLESS MARKET #1 operates as a rap project without music. The retail floor becomes a stage. At LRC, Lydia Rodrigues’s hybrid space of fashion, art, and retail, the audience moving through the racks does the work. What looks like shopping is performance.

Caban grew up in Soundview, the Bronx, where clothing marked affiliation and belonging. Logos, teams, and brands operated as signals, shorthands exhibited publicly and exchanged as currency, mirroring the circulation of codes and allegiances in hip-hop culture. Fabric holds memory longer than enthusiasm.

As the shirts circulate at LRC, the field gradually contracts. The racks thin out, and the logic of the market reasserts itself. Once the stock dwindles to 111 pieces, WORTHLESS MARKET #1 closes. F1RST T1ME withdraws the remaining garments from circulation and fixes them as an archive. What remains is an inventory of indifference rather than excellence. This archive prizes aesthetic, ideological, and attentional failure. Value and desire invert. 

Rejection becomes exclusivity.