SIDEWALK GALAXY (2020)
Hundreds of millions of galaxies exist in our universe. New galaxies are discovered all the time. During the pandemic, I found one myself. After shelter-in-place orders descended in March 2020, I began to take long, exploratory walks through my city to fill the time. One day, I encountered a spectacular paint splatter on 24th Avenue, in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood.
The next day I returned, and in an homage to Ingrid Calame, I traced the image on the sidewalk. A week later, I had captured each drop, line and splash of this strange, wonderful form. The tracing hung on my studio wall for weeks while I studied it as I worked on other projects. The sprawl of yellow paint and the concrete’s pebbly texture coalesced into an intricate, exploding galactic swirl. Eventually, I decided to document this new celestial body in high-energy color as if observing it through radio waves or infrared photography.