SHOCK UC MSK is a painter, sculptor, and multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of graffiti, abstraction, and contemporary painting. A longtime member of the legendary MSK crew, Shock has built a nationally recognized practice grounded in movement, material, and intuition. Born in the Midwest and raised across cityscapes, Shock developed his visual language through years of painting walls, freights, and industrial spaces-learning not from books, but from bricks.
Today, his work spans painting, sculpture, video, sound, printmaking, and site-specific installation. Shock constructs his paintings on salvaged industrial surfaces-HVAC panels, electrical boxes, and architectural scraps-collected from abandoned warehouses and factory ruins across the country. These materials arrive with their own stories. Shock responds through a method he calls call and response-a layered exchange between gesture and surface, history and presence.
His large-scale painting installations often unfold in collaboration with fellow artists, transforming overlooked spaces into mythic environments that hold memory, motion, and feeling. Whether abstract or figurative, still or moving, Shock's work speaks with urgency and emotional clarity. It resists easy categorization while remaining deeply rooted in the cultures that shaped him.
Shock's practice honors graffiti's legacy while pushing beyond its boundaries, inviting new conversations about painting, authorship, and survival. His work has been exhibited nationally and continues to evolve across media, geography, and time.
SHOCK UC MSK
(b. Midwest, USA - lives and works between Minneapolis and everywhere else)
SHOCK UC MSK is a painter, sculptor, and multidisciplinary artist whose practice emerges from the lineage of graffiti writing, reimagined for the present moment. A member of the legendary MSK crew, Shock has spent the past two decades building a body of work rooted in movement, adaptation, and raw creative force.
Born in the Midwest and raised between cityscapes, Shock's early education came from walls, rooftops, freight yards, and underground publications. He developed a reputation not just for his distinctive visual style, but for his relentless work ethic and commitment to the evolution of the form. His current practice spans painting, sculpture, video, printmaking, sound, installation, design, and performance.
At the core of his work is a deep relationship with surface, material, and site. Shock constructs his paintings on salvaged industrial objects-metal panels, electrical boxes, HVAC ducting-sourced from abandoned warehouses, grain silos, and factory ruins across the country. These objects arrive with their own histories, and through layers of paint, gesture, and mark-making, Shock transforms them into charged visual fields. His large-scale installations, often created collaboratively in vacant or transitional spaces, serve as portals-temporary, mythic, and unforgettable.
Shock's work navigates the space between personal myth and public language. Equally informed by graffiti's coded systems and painting's formal concerns, his work refuses categorization. Whether abstract or figurative, still or moving, it remains unmistakably his: layered, immediate, and emotionally precise.
A respected figure in both underground and institutional spaces, Shock has exhibited nationally and continues to produce ambitious projects across disciplines. His work resists convention, favors intuition, and reflects the world back to us-unfiltered, layered, and alive.