Last month I went to New York City to get some inspiration for the “Metropolitan Series” for the TENxTENxTEN project. It had been almost 10 years since I had been back, so my mind was virtually blank when it came any kind of inspiration or possible idea for the piece. I think the last time I was in NYC I had just re-emerged my desires to be a painter, so my thought processes and understanding to convert my visual landscape into a project were at best minimal, if at all, existing in the first place.
I was staying with an old friend that I knew from San Francisco that had recently moved to the Upper West Side in Manhattan. He had somehow secured tickets to a Wanda Sykes comedy show, and invited me along to see her perform. We rode over to the brightly lit and jam packed tourist epicenter of NYC in Times Square over to the VIACOM building, and waited in line for a bit. While in queue, we came to realization through various sources of information from people around us, that
1. This was a live taping
2. This technically wasn’t a comedy show