The Narcissist Series began with two observations. First, that much contemporary international art jewelry seemed to conform to an archetypal visual language, and second, contemporary international art jewelry — as practiced in the United States — is largely an insular and academic activity. Sustained research into the prevailing aesthetic trends of contemporary international art jewelry led to the creation of a series of rings which prominently featured rendered images of the rings themselves. Frustrated with the insular nature of the whole endeavor (the form language, the seriousness and especially the pedantry) I devised a system to contextualize the rings in relation to their academic origin. Beginning with a short play about academic jewelry making (documented later as a video), then proceeding with self-referential imagery and printed materials, I drew attention to the self-importance and pretension that academic jewelry often exudes, despite being an extremely marginal form of cultural production in general. All the while I used myself and the jewelry objects as the vehicle for this examination, insisting that satirical self-flagellation through over the top narcissism can be funny.