A Diamond District jeweler took one of weed culture’s most temporary objects and tried to make it permanent. The finished piece looks like a luxury object. Getting there was not.
Reported with Cesar Soriano
Ahead of 4/20 last year, a bag of cannabis showed up at a Diamond District jewelry shop, and according to the crew, none of it got smoked. It wasn’t a gift for the staff. It was raw material. “We didn’t smoke any of it, of course,” said Angel, a jeweler on the TraxNYC floor. “It was for production.” The shop had never tried what it was about to: taking a real cannabis nug and turning it into solid gold.
This was not a gold-plated flower or a nug sealed inside a shell. The flower itself became the model, packed in plaster, burned out with heat, then replaced by molten metal that hardened inside the cavity it left behind. The weed disappeared. The gold kept the form, down to the texture.
The gold kept the texture of the flower it replaced. Photo by Cesar Soriano.
For Maksud “Trax” Agadjani, who founded TraxNYC as a teenager in the early 2000s and has since made custom pieces for a long list of rappers and athletes, appeared in Uncut Gems and, this past January, went viral for a Diamond District brawl that ended with two rival jewelers under arrest, the pull was simple. “The fact that you could take a real flower and turn it into gold is amazing,” he said. He has a simpler word for the reaction it got: magic. “What catches people’s attention is magic,” he said.
Maksud “Trax” Agadjani at TraxNYC. Photo by Cesar Soriano.
The idea came from Cesar Soriano, who publishes under the name T.H.Caeczar and brought the concept …
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Author: High Times / High Times
