Springfield (STATIC), 2025

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

Springfield (STATIC) depicts the grand rail corridor of the former Pillsbury Mill in Springfield, Illinois: a site where the artist built a self-supported residency inside a decaying industrial monument. Once the distribution point for America’s grain supply, this passageway carried Pillsbury products by train across the country.

In 2024, it became the nucleus of the artist’s project Treasure: a radical exhibition within the ruins, where each wall held a painting by a close collaborator. The alley, now half-collapsed and littered with red brick, functioned as an open-air museum for anyone willing to make the journey.

In this painting, the artist overlays that physical memory with a fragment of blueprint found inside the building: its text blurred, its measurements uncertain. The diagram becomes both architecture and internal dialogue: an X-ray of thought, a schematic of the artist’s own spatial and emotional mapping. The inclusion of STATIC in the title nods to one of SHOCK’s most important collaborators. Together, the two artists reimagine America’s industrial remnants: conduits, fixtures, and forgotten spaces, transforming them into sculptural works charged with new purpose.

SHOCK described the consciousness behind the painting simply:

“Created while they chased me around the building. It was personal. Life stories. Add as much as you can, and when it’s time to go, we go.”

As with much of SHOCK’s work, the surface functions like a living notebook: layered with gestures, markings, and partially erased diagrams. He has long used blueprints and technical drawings as both sketchbook and site of reclamation: places where history and intuition collide.

Springfield (STATIC) stands as both document and metaphor: an image of creation under pressure, an elegy for the industrial past, and a continuation of the artist’s dialogue with space, labor, and transformation.