Paint Saint Louis 2025

This body of work documents and interprets the 2025 Paint St. Louis mural project along the Mississippi River floodwall. While rooted in a specific place and event, the photographs are not intended as comprehensive records. Instead, they function as selective responses—fragments, confrontations, and moments of visual tension extracted from a continuously evolving surface.

The murals themselves operate at the intersection of myth, pop culture, and contemporary social commentary. In photographing them, emphasis is placed on contrast and adjacency: the collision of color and restraint, the coexistence of the figurative and the symbolic, and the way scale and gesture shift when translated from public space into a photographic frame. Cropping, isolation, and sequencing are used deliberately, allowing individual works to speak without dissolving into spectacle.

As the series progresses, the imagery moves from observation toward confrontation. Figures become more direct, symbols more charged, and compositions more compressed. The closing image, Last Witness, marks a point of culmination rather than summary. It does not explain the work that precedes it, nor does it resolve it. Instead, it holds tension in place—suggesting endurance, presence, and the residue of meaning left behind after expression has peaked.

Taken together, the photographs are less about muralism as an art form than about attention: how visual language asserts itself in public space, how it is encountered, and how it lingers when removed from its original context. The series invites sustained viewing, rewarding restraint over immediacy and reflection over consumption.