Artist: SHOCK UC MSK
Title: In Paris, 2013
Edition: 3 plus proofs
Medium: Screen print on paper
Size: 16 1/4 x 23 1/4 inches (sheet size) / 14 x 21 inches (image size)
Price: $555 (shipping included, U.S. only)
Availability
Artist’s Proof 1/3 available through Joe Ellis Art. This impression is one of the only remaining examples from the edition.
The Sky Inside the City
There are moments when a city reveals itself in a single glance upward. In Paris, SHOCK stood beneath the Eiffel Tower and photographed the tunnel of steel and amber light rising above him. The structure becomes a vortex, a glowing lattice that feels less like architecture and more like the inside of a thought. The image is not a postcard view. It is not a tourist’s perspective. It is the vantage point of someone who arrived with a writer’s eye, searching for the pulse that links cities across distance.
By design, along the left side of the print, the artist wrote in his own hand:
“Because Everything is Working Out Fine.”
The text can be read as reassurance or warning, prayer or prophecy. The meaning changes depending on the reader’s history and the weight they carry. The ambiguity is intentional.
Flash Back (2013)
The print was pulled in SHOCK’s first screen printing studio, the Acrylic Factory in Northeast Minneapolis. Using the CMYK process, he separated the photograph into layers and printed each color by hand. The studio was built from whatever materials he had access to. It was a place where photography, writing, and printmaking began to merge into an early version of the language he would spend the next decade refining.
These early Paris prints were made in extremely small numbers, and very few impressions have survived. The available proof is one of the only stable examples in the archive.
Flash Forward (2025)
The fusion of text and image visible in this print continues through the artist’s current work. The handwritten line, drifting along the image like a thought, echoes through his later poems painted on concrete and steel across cities throughout the United States. The upward gaze, the sense of pressure and light, the quiet intensity of the moment, all continue to appear in his sculptural and painted works.
The print is more than a memory of a trip. It marks the beginning of a lifelong negotiation with place, movement, and language. The gesture of looking up becomes the structure of the work.
The Throughline
From Paris in 2013 to the present, the practice remains unified. Photography, writing, printmaking, painting, sculpture, and installation are all expressions of the same impulse. The question is always how the world imprints itself on the artist and how he, in turn, inscribes himself back onto it.
To hold this print is to hold a moment when the artist’s vision sharpened. It is a fragment of a turning point, preserved through surface and color. The handwritten text becomes a portal into the inner life of a writer who had not yet become the painter he is today, yet already carried the full weight of his language.
The timeline folds together.
Paris becomes Minneapolis.
Light becomes ink.
Experience becomes mark.
KOOL SHOCK becoming.
Joe Ellis
