A modular collage series built from urban textures photographed across New York City.

 

Street Tiles is an ongoing body of digitally composed works built from layered textures found in public space—poster remnants, painted surfaces, sidewalk grids, and construction debris. These fragments are reorganized into modular compositions that draw on Neo-Concrete strategies, particularly the tension between structure and lived experience.

The project’s title references Portuguese ceramic tiles—azulejos—introduced to Brazil through colonial channels as ornamental imperial design. In contrast, Street Tiles reconstructs the tiled surface using paper, paste, and commercial printing. Sourced entirely from New York City, the work reassembles a colonial aesthetic through the visual debris of a contemporary global capital. This gesture transforms the legacy of tiling into a structure for reflection, interruption, and reassembly.

Printed at walk-in commercial shops and wheatpasted by hand, the works reintroduce the physical labor of image-making and collapse the space between studio, street, and screen. Rooted in digital tools yet grounded in place, the series acts as an open archive of urban surfaces, where formal repetition and spatial compression echo both modernist design principles and the fragmented experience of contemporary city life.