Since I can remember, I have been interested in the reproduction of systems, particularly in the critical or sensitive moments in which the systems pivot, alter or mutate. This inquiry has taken on various forms; at times political, perceptual, introspective, figurative, literal, linguistic, cultural, visual. It has stayed in for years, decades even, while being too tired or busy seemily focusing on other things. It has played out deeply in our businesses, and at times in relationships.

On the whole I don't believe that my work is political, in the sense that I am more interested in foundations, a multiplicity of angles from geo-historical and deeply lived perspectives. This surfaces in the unfolding Earth in swift nude _____, in singing and seeing the unforeseeable in Great Balls of Fire, in flight, fear and irony at a bus stop where nothing seems to happen in Dayton, Ohio Bus Stop, or in the voice of a young Chinese American boy who is trying to figure out who are his mother's parents and who are his father's. It is embedded in my interest in national boundaries, my study of the formation of thoughts and memories, in my interest in ancient city walls, laws, locks, chains, architectural spaces, marriages, promises, names and definitions. It is equally embedded and arises in our coffee shops. In a way the businesses have been pretexts for this and other lines of thinking about existence.

I feel drawn to envisioning and capturing a world as it exists in motion, something whose deepest meanings cannot be found through explanation, definition, or fixed categorization.

Instead of saying more, I'll leave you with a hint, something that occurred to me one day while walking down the street in East London after someone had asked me to put Great Balls of Fire in the context of my work.

I believe insight can be found here.

London
By William Blake

I wander through every chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness marks of woe.

In every cry of every man
In every infant's cry of fear
In every voice in every ban
The mind forged manacles I hear.

How the chimney sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appalls
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.

But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the newborn infant's tear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.

Influences: my wife Areli Barrera de Grodski, the Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, David Solow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Shirin Neshat, Frederick Douglass, Martin Heidegger, Christoph Schmitz-Scholemann, my mother, friends and family, The English Patient, Rodney Graham, Wong Kar-Wai, Shakespeare, living in Paris, Cologne, Cherokee, NYC, all thinkers and creators and immersion in the wonder of travel.