SIDEWALK GALAXY (2020)
Hundreds of millions of galaxies exist in our universe. Scientists are discovering new galaxies all the time. I found one myself last year, with the help of the pandemic. After shelter-in-place orders descended in March 2020, I began to wander around my city, taking long, exploratory walks to fill the time. One day, I encountered a spectacular paint splatter on 24th Avenue, on a wide sidewalk at the entrance to Lincoln High School, in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood.
I returned the next day, in an homage to a favorite artist, Ingrid Calame, with tracing paper, tape, pens and a face mask. A week later, I had captured each drop, line and splash of this strange, wonderful form. I pinned the pieces on my studio wall and studied it while I continued work on other projects. The sprawl of yellow paint and the concrete’s pebbly texture had 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.