"As a Brooklyn native, I am inspired by the flux of the city: memories and photographs of painted elevated trains, illumin(at)ed windows in nocturnal cityscapes, broken glass shimmering in dull sidewalks, and the panoply of cultural pluralism, increasing by the day, even in a city already as diverse as New York. In the public space of the city, street artists appropriate the urban environment by layering ideas on top of one another. Wheat pasted posters, aerosol designs, white rolled lettering, advertisements, stickers, peeling and decaying paper, brick. The process I use in my most recent work is an attempt to mimic this. I collage the initial surface or leave it clean, and then paint projected drawings over it. This layering technique results in an interplay of tangled, swooping, and jutting lines, which coalesce into unexpected shapes, emerging as vivid fields of color. Ultimately these images are informed by urban iconography, but they also contain a more personal narrative. Much time is spent filling pages with automatous ink drawings, rendered and defined, before projection. The viewer is presented with a dichotomy, as, despite its condensed and chaotic appearance, the work strikes the eye as both simple and open. The projections abstract the original surface image, the process creates a nocturnal environment, leading me beyond the physicality of the urban landscape."

James M. Rizzi, Summer 2005