There's a painting I made years ago, right before I left California for Europe for the first time. It's just a memory now — I don't even have a good photo. But I remember it clearly: a city square dominated by a monumental pedestal, and on top of it, a figure in weathered bronze, holding a painting, turned away, looking out past a closed-down SFMOMA and a shuttered church.
I made it specifically to put in the SFMOMA. This was 1996 — no social media, no audience. Just me and the museum. I took a few photos for myself, but the act was the point. I felt I needed to do it, so I did. And the strangest part: they kept it. I've never seen it again. No idea if it's still there.
You can't map every step. You make the work, you trust it has a life of its own, and you play the long game — planting seeds without knowing if or when they'll grow.
So I followed that thread. I landed in art school in Utrecht, later co-founding a DIY art group in New York, making work outside institutions. Back to Europe, the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam. Then back to San Francisco, and eventually Berlin, where I live and work now. Living in that back-and-forth, I found my position. My work is the conversation between European conceptual rigor and American faith in craft and getting things made. The same energy I found in skateboarding and freestyle ciphers: direct, honest, now.
That position shapes everything I make. I work in the space between analog and digital, between the handmade mark and the algorithm, between the historical artifact and the cutting-edge tool. I write JavaScript to source and manipulate satellite imagery. I build tools to generate perspectives that didn't exist before. But a strong concept means nothing if it isn't approachable — the craft carries it: the careful photo transfer, the line of code, the intuitive brushstroke.
The long game was never about a single painting. It's about building a different way to work. I've come to believe the most interesting art happens not at the center of an institution, but in the quiet space between the work and the person seeing it. That's the conversation I started by hanging a painting where I wasn't supposed to.
