About MojoFascination
We all know what it’s like to be watched – we don’t have a choice about it these days – but we can choose our attitude towards those ubiquitous eyes. We can have a little fun with the situation.
So is that a pretty butterfly…? Or…WAIT A SECOND…
I’m Alice Ola, out of Salt Lake City, and the designs I share here are my passion. They have roots in ancient history. I’ve always been fascinated by ancient iconography, especially objects which serve a function like turning aside the evil eye or bringing good luck. The Romans used the flying penis motif (the fascinum, from the same root as the English word “fascinate”) for precisely that. They weren’t big on gender equality back then, but with a little additional research I found that there’s also an old folk tradition of exposed female genitalia scaring away devils, and I’m down with that too.
When you wear my apparel or hang one of my chimes in your house, you’re playing with the concept of being observed. Will Aunt Nancy or Uncle Carlos clock what they’re seeing when they visit? No idea, but it’ll be fun to find out.
MojoFascination holds eye contact with the observer. It celebrates the creative energy of life that doesn’t need permission to exist. I started this company because I was tired of being afraid of being observed. I wanted to turn that whole trope on its head. You like to watch? OK, here’s something fun to look at. The designs challenge you to decode them, then they challenge you with what they are. With any luck, you’ll laugh when you figure it out, because it’s human laughter that turns aside the evil eye.
About Me
Each day I want to see what kind of reality I can get away with.
I’ve had a super weird life so far, and it’s pretty difficult to sum up in a bio of any reasonable length, but I’ll give it a go:
I was born in the Bahamas in 1974, and adopted by a Scottish man married to a Bahamian woman. Due to the eccentricities of citizenship law I ended up without a nationality at all for a little while. After several decades of continuing adventures in immigration I’m now a triple citizen, but I have no actual native country. I’m the Universal Immigrant.
Out of all the places on the planet I could be, I love Salt Lake City the best. No, I’m not Mormon. I’m not religious at all, but I’ve put down deep roots in this place. It’s my place.
The punch line is that when I found my bio family in my late 30s after several years of DNA testing and serendipitous sleuthing, all of them are from New Mexico, just one state over from here. I can’t throw a rock there without hitting a cousin, but I had to apply for U.S. citizenship. I’ve been a citizen here since 2020.
I’m AFAB but when I was in my 40s I became aware of the term “nonbinary” and immediately recognized myself. It was a relief to finally have a name for the sensation I’d been experiencing my whole life. Frankly I’m too old to give much of a shit about my pronouns, and they’re almost never used to my face anyway. Call me whatever. I don’t look particularly masculine but I still get called “sir” about once a year by people who subconsciously vibe me. They’re invariably mortified, but I think it’s hilarious.
I’m a triple-A kid: Adopted, Autistic, and ADHD. I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to imagine what my childhood and teen years might have been like in the wasteland of the late Cold War, living between three different countries where bullies bestrode the schoolyards like mythical colossi…and me having been the kind of kid who would use the phrase “mythical colossi” in casual speech.
MojoFascination comes as a rebalancing: it comes out of a life lived under scrutiny; decades of time where my visas could be revoked on a whim by faceless bureaucrats, where the whole shape of my existence was chronically contingent and had to be muted.
Fuck that.
My designs are loud. They glitter. They shine and flash in the light. They glow in the dark. They feature ridiculous (yet somehow tasteful) flying genitals and arcane talismans against ill attention. They call on the old gods who are currently being hauled back from the brink of oblivion by chaos magic. They are life energy. They are MOJO.