CHRIS “DAZE” ELLIS started to become a graffiti writer in 1977 while he was a high school student at the High School of Art and Design. The name Daze comes out of the desire to assume a pseudonym that contained the letters “E” and ”Z”, because no other writer had taken these letters. His creative and artistic nature encouraged him to find wide, open spaces to make his work. When he could, he would take over an entire subway car, developing images in the fields and volumes it offered, looking to create a broader master work. The need to manifest one’s desires, and express awareness of one’s existence in a spontaneous, life affirming way, drove Daze to create rich and harmonious imagery of transforming the process of writing into a true system of image making. The letters are bound together “one inside of the other”, interacting so as to make a new three dimensional space, where characters recede in perspective, allowing them to acquire sculptural depth.-Enrico Pedrini