"These aren’t just paintings. They’re records—of movement, memory, and midnight rituals. Shock turns industrial scraps into sacred surfaces, building a new visual language from bricks, not books."
Daydreaming at Midnight presents new works by SHOCK UC MSK, made during a year of studio practice that moved between cities, surfaces, and states of being. Many of the paintings were created inside the abandoned Pillsbury Mills factory in Springfield, Illinois-an industrial ruin repurposed by the artist into a space for murals, sculptures, and large-scale painting.
Working with salvaged metal-HVAC panels, electrical covers, plywood, canvas-SHOCK layers spray paint, rollers, homemade markers, and brushes in a call and response method: a rhythmic interplay between material and intention. The surfaces retain their history, and SHOCK doesn't erase it. Instead, he writes his own language across it.
A longtime graffiti writer and member of the influential MSK crew, SHOCK approaches painting through movement, intuition, and lived experience. His visual vocabulary-raw abstraction, coded figuration, poetic mark-making-emerges not from the traditional academy, but from a deep engagement with the process of painting. This is a practice learned through doing. Not books, but bricks.
The works oscillate between pure abstraction and portraiture. Some paintings pulse with kinetic color and fractured forms; others depict masked figures mid-motion, echoing the secret choreography of nighttime painting. Each work becomes a site of memory-a record of risk, of repetition, of refusal.
Rather than fitting neatly into categories like graffiti, abstraction, or figurative painting, SHOCK's work offers an expanded model of what painting can be: a convergence of urgency and control, gesture and restraint, survival and invention. His practice speaks to a lineage of American artists-post-graffiti, post-industrial, post-institutional-who create from within the gaps of the system while rewriting the map.
Daydreaming at Midnight is a meditation on solitude, process, and transformation. It invites viewers into a world most people never see-and honors the quiet, relentless act of creating in the margins.
