Artist: SHOCK UC MSK
Title: Davison Freeway, Interstate 75, Detroit MI, 2013
Edition: 6 plus 3 artist’s proofs
Medium: Screen print on paper
Size: 24 1/4 x 18 inches (sheet size) / 20 x 16 3/4 inches (image size)
Price: $555 (shipping included, U.S. only)

Availability
Edition number 6/6 available through Joe Ellis Art. This impression is one of the only surviving examples from the edition.

The Concrete Threshold
Cities are built on thresholds: overpasses, underpasses, bridges, the seams where traffic and time lock together. Davison Freeway is one of these spaces, a place alive with the hum of the city after midnight, where concrete rises in layers and light stitches across the frame. For SHOCK, these structures are not background scenery. They are sites of memory, movement, and initiation. The freeway is the quiet cathedral of American infrastructure, a space writers know long before sunrise. This print is not documentary. It is the artist’s autobiography in the language of concrete.

Flash Back (2013)
The photograph at the heart of this print was taken in Detroit during a late-night walk. With a long exposure, headlights stretch into red and white bands, motion becoming line. The architecture stacks into itself, heavy and rhythmic. Even then, SHOCK was seeing the city as he sees writing: form, repetition, energy, the pulse of a place.

The print was created in his first studio, the Acrylic Factory in Northeast Minneapolis, where he taught himself to translate images into layered CMYK separations. One color at a time, one layer at a time, he pulled these impressions by hand. These years were marked by travel, solitude, and movement through cities at their quietest hours. Davison Freeway is a relic of that period, and very few impressions remain.

Flash Forward (2025)
The instincts visible in this print continue through the artist’s current work. The movement in the headlights and the weight of the overpass echo through the forms of his large-scale paintings and sculptural works on salvaged metal. The same attention to structure, rhythm, and surface persists. The cities have changed, but the eye has not. Movement, adaptation, and the quiet of late-night travel are still central to the work.

The Throughline
From Detroit in 2013 to the present moment, the practice remains continuous. Photography, writing, movement, printmaking, and sculpture are not separate modes but a single evolving investigation. The question is always the same: how does a place become a mark, and how does a mark become a memory.

To hold this print is to hold a threshold in the artist’s development. It captures the moment when infrastructure became image and the city became language. It is both an artifact and an origin point, carrying forward the energy that continues through the work today.

KOOL SHOCK in motion.

Joe Ellis