This painting is a return—to space, to collaboration, to the sacred geometry of the studio itself.

The central image, rendered in spray paint, depicts the grand train tracks that cut through the heart of the abandoned Pillsbury Mill complex in Springfield, Illinois. It was here, in October 2024, that SHOCK UC MSK staged Treasure—a self-organized exhibition that transformed the ruins into a gallery of living graffiti. Each wall in the alleyway held a piece by a visiting artist. The buildings loomed like cathedrals. The tracks ran between them like memory.

The title references STATIC, one of SHOCK’s most vital collaborators. Together, they co-develop sculptural lamps built from salvaged conduit and industrial fragments recovered from mills and silos across the country. When they work together, the energy changes. Ideas accelerate. Springfield (STATIC) reflects that charge.

The outer shapes of the composition—drawn in marker—are borrowed from blueprints found inside the Pillsbury Mill. The artist often draws on these schematics, prints over them, collages them into new surfaces. Here, they frame the central image like a psychic diagram: part blueprint, part transmission, part dream.

This painting is layered. Physical time collapses. The Springfield alley is reimagined from memory—while the painting itself is made in Minneapolis, post-vault, at 2010 Hennepin. Like Chicago Yard, Night, the artist is painting the place where he once painted. A recursion. A reclamation. A living archive.

Springfield (STATIC) holds a key to the entire project. It’s the energy that made Daydreaming at Midnight possible. A dream that reached from the ruins into the city, and now, back again.