I’m fascinated by graffiti covered street signs. I hunt these crowdsourced "readymade" public art installations obsessively--capturing them with my iPhone before the San Francisco Sanitation Department wipes them away, ironically prepping the canvas for the next batch of street writers who happen to pass by. I'm attracted to the dichotomy of these images; they are man-made but grow organically and randomly with a distinct life cycle; the foliage of an urban jungle. Like any found object, this body of work doesn't have an explicit meaning--it isn't non-objective but rather enigmatically multi-objective. Through this simulacra, a once ephemeral object becomes preserved like a bug in amber or like handprints on cave walls. My photos become the basis for digital paintings, which are then printed on aluminum dibond, the same process by which street signs are created—echoing the material and scale of the original subjects. (Two pieces, '3rd & Folsom' and 'Mission Between 8th & 9th #1' were exhibited at NYC's Hewitt Gallery of Art in the summer of 2016.)
