Created in SHOCK UC MSK’s first print studio.
Glowing Disk shows us that graffiti, poetry, and printmaking are inseparable. Made in 2013, only now released from the archive.
WE SEE CLEARLY
WHAT YOU HOLD DEARLY
PROFESSIONAL
HAND 2 HANDS TO HANDOUTS
THE DOOR LOCKS BEHIND YOU
PERMANENTLY ATTACHED TO THE MOST SHADY
SHORT LIVED IN DOUBT
REMAIN URBAN CALAMITY
NEVER WIN KEEP PEDALIN
EXPOSING THE ALL MIGHTY
Artist: SHOCK UC MSK
Title: Glowing Disk, 2013
Edition: 10 + Proofs
Medium: Screen print on paper
Size: 11 x 22 inches (sheet size); subject to minor variation / 10 x 21 inches (image size)
Price: $222 (shipping included, U.S. only)
Availability
4 impressions available now exclusively through Joe Ellis Art — to you, before anyone else.
2 additional impressions will be released publicly on MNVICE, 09/26/2025.
The Invisible War
Language is not neutral. It can be used to control, diminish, and wound. Violence carries forward through words. In the lineage of Rammellzee’s Gothic Futurism, SHOCK’s work extends that vision. His paintings, prints, and poems both liberate and armor the letter, playing with the shape of language until the form gives way to reveal what lies beneath. What most never perceive, but all feel, is this invisible battle. From this space, the artist creates.
Flash Back (2013)
Glowing Disk was pulled in SHOCK’s first screen printing studio (2013–2016), the Acrylic Factory in Northeast Minneapolis. In the image, a table is cluttered with bottles and spray paint, handstyles scattered like fragments of thought, a figure blurred into color, lit from below and within. A still life, unconsciously arranged by his early twenties: soda, cigarettes, beer, CDs. Printed with the CMYK process. Already, the poet and the painter were one — image and language inseparable, words orbiting the page, activating negative space, stepping off the sheet with no need for permission.
Flash Forward (2025)
Today, these same words evolve and reappear across the country. SHOCK’s poems, raw and unfiltered, are painted on concrete and steel. Declarations of survival, fragments of beauty, warnings of truth. The battle continues in plain sight, in real time. Words stripped bare, meanings broken open, reclaimed in public view. This is the work of the artist.
The Throughline
From Glowing Disk (2013) to the present, the practice is unbroken. Graffiti, print, painting, poetry — not separate, but inseparable. Each mark extends from the same line: language bent, the word reimagined, the image made to speak. To hold this print is to hold more than paper. It is an artifact of the artist’s early studio, charged with the same energy still carried onto walls today. The timeline folds together, past and present carried forward through the same hand.
