Survival in the Amazon Pt. I, 2025

Spray paint, marker, and house paint on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Survival in the Amazon Pt. I was born in a temporary studio inside the Chambers Hotel, where the artist transformed an empty ballroom above Hennepin Avenue into a working space. The painting captures a moment between two figures: STATIC, in the foreground, holding a bolt cutter, and SHOCK, in the background, his form rendered as a dark silhouette. The scene references a real moment at Alien City, an abandoned industrial site that became a recurring setting for both artists’ collaborations.

In this composition, the glowing green figure of STATIC becomes something beyond the physical, a representation of the divine spark in art, the charge that turns necessity into creation. The figure radiates like a current, caught between devotion and defiance, preparing to break something open. Behind him, the shadow of SHOCK: the artist, the persona, the compulsion, stands in quiet counterpoint, watching, creating, bearing witness.

What appears to be a scene of transgression unfolds instead as a meditation on faith and risk, the space between crime and creation, light and labor. The “Amazon” here is not the jungle but the urban wilderness the artists move through, where survival depends on ingenuity, trust, and persistence.

Technically and emotionally, the work bridges the mythic and the documentary. It folds biblical and graffiti iconography into one charged visual field, Christ and the bolt cutter, the artist and his double, illumination and shadow.

Survival in the Amazon Pt. I is a picture about devotion: to art, to craft, to the code of the writer and to the unseen forces that make creation possible at all.