Stories – 2016-2025

Stories (2016–2025) is a work that moves across time, space, and technology. It began as an analog collage in 2016, built from cut paper, fragments of print history, and images rescued from forgotten sources. Nearly a decade later, in 2025, the piece was expanded and rebuilt through digital processes. The act of returning to a past work and carrying it forward into a new medium is itself a form of storytelling. The collage evolves into something hybrid, where the original hand-cut edges still show through, but the digital code adds another layer of life.

This work is a collision of narratives. The spray can, the vintage figures, and the abstract forms each become characters, speaking from different eras yet sharing the same visual stage. They are both subjects and symbols, acting as reminders of cultural shifts, personal memories, and collective archives. The composition does not present a single story but rather a dense constellation of stories that overlap, contradict, and echo one another.

Time itself becomes the material here. The analog past and the digital present are not separate but connected by an invisible thread. The act of collage was always about recombination and remix, but in digital space that potential is amplified. Nostalgia is only part of the equation. The work becomes a dialogue between decades, between print and pixel, between the human hand and the algorithm. The analog meets the code, and in that union a new aesthetic emerges.

At the same time, Stories carries the energy of graffiti and New York City’s layered visual culture. The spray can is not simply a reference but a signal, a reminder of walls that spoke in color before the blockchain ever existed. This approach to remix, layering, and code-switching between mediums is a continuation of that practice. In many ways, this work represents a pre-crypto art language, an aesthetic already experimenting with hybrid forms before the term “crypto art” was ever popularized. Now that it exists on-chain, it marks a full-circle moment, bridging a past practice with the permanence of blockchain archives.

Stories is also a meditation on persistence. Images and symbols never disappear. They wait, archived in magazines, films, hard drives, and now blockchains. When they reappear, they bring traces of where they have been. The collage asks viewers to consider how stories adapt and transform when carried from one era to the next. It is not about closure but about openness, about the way an unfinished sentence might find its ending years later in a different medium.

For me, returning to this work was not just an act of nostalgia but a deliberate act of bridging. The process of rebuilding it digitally was a way of creating a portal, one that allows older fragments to move forward while generating new connections. The result is a vibrant meditation on storytelling itself. Stories persist because we keep retelling them, reshaping them, and rediscovering them in new contexts. In this way, the piece carries echoes of the past while opening a passage into what comes next.

This piece is currently available here <—