An early print from SHOCK UC MSK’s first studio, Glowing Disk connects graffiti, poetry, and printmaking in one continuous practice.
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)
The Invisible War
Language is not neutral. It can be used to control, diminish, and inflict harm. Systems of violence are carried forward through words. In the lineage of Rammellzee’s Gothic Futurism, SHOCK’s work continues this mission. His paintings, prints, and poems both liberate and armor the letter, playing with the shape of language until the form gives way to what lies beneath. What most never perceive, but all feel, is this invisible war. SHOCK’s practice makes the invisible visible, and leaves beauty in its wake.
Flash Back (2013)
Glowing Disk was created in SHOCK’s first screen printing studio (2013–2016), the Acrylic Factory in Northeast Minneapolis. In this 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, arranged by the artist’s 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, walking themselves off the sheet, no need for permission.
Flash Forward (2025)
Today, these same words evolve and reappear across city walls. SHOCK’s poems, raw and unfiltered, are painted on concrete and steel. Declarations of survival, fragments of beauty, warnings of truth. A language bending over and over until the form gives way, forcing the passerby to look through it, experiencing themselves. 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 continuous. Graffiti, print, painting, poetry — not separate, but inseparable. Each mark extends the same line: the intention of language bent, the word reworked, 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 speaking through the same hand.
