Feeding The Ant Pile: Connor Grasso's Creative Exchange

"I just want to be known for making all kinds of cool shit," Connor Grasso tells me with a laugh. The unfiltered, casual statement perfectly sums up his approach to creativity: chase the curiosity, ignore the lanes.

Off-Grid Beginnings

In a world of specialists and personal brands, Grasso's refusal to be confined to a single medium feels almost rebellious. The multidisciplinary artist— photographer, 3D creator, designer, web developer— moves between disciplines with uncommon fluidity, letting his creative energy flow wherever it wants. That adaptability wasn't cultivated in art school or tech studios but in the unforgiving wilderness of Alaska, on Stampede Road— the same dirt track that Into the Wild made famous.

"I grew up in a cabin without running water until I was about ten," he says. Days were rivers and spruce trees; nights, aurora-lit silence. "I spent all my time outside, and I yearn for it more as I get older. I wish I could just run around in the rivers and the mountains all the time."

That constant immersion in nature sharpened his perception. Even now, living in Los Angeles and visiting San Francisco, Grasso catches details most of us miss. "I saw a guy on the 30th floor watering plants with a hose," he tells me. "I just notice those things all day, every day." That heightened awareness, born in the wilderness, has become his most valuable creative tool.

One summer in Fairbanks, teenage Connor picked up a camera. The mission was simple: preserve moments for Future-Connor. "When I'm getting into my old age, when I'm in my 80s, I want to be able to look back at my life in detail and see things that I forgot about," he explains. Nostalgia, for him, isn't backward-looking sentiment, it's forward-looking preservation. 

The (Accidental) Psycho-Conceptualist

Ask him what he is today and he offers a shrug. Photographer? Crypto-artist? Web designer? "I'm a psycho-conceptualist... I guess," he says, half-serious, half-bemused at the label he invented. The phrase emerged after formative experiences pairing psychedelic exploration with immersion in nature.

"Early on in my art journey, I tried a few things that kind of opened my mind up to seeing things differently," he explains. "I was pairing them with nature quite a lot of the time...I would take some of those things and go hike a mountain or run around in a forest."

These experiences became what he calls "a huge through line" in his work, a different way of processing reality that influenced his artistic output across every medium. "There's this sort of unlockable space that exists when you're using those things," he says, eyes lighting up. His art has been trying to stretch that elastic ever since.

Importantly, the psychedelia is conceptual, not decorative. "It's energy to me," he says. "I'm taking the energy and giving that energy, or taking in that energy and creating from that. I don't need to get into every speck and every detail." The focus is always on "how far can I take this?" rather than relying on familiar motifs.

The Ant-Pile Theory of Art

Underpinning Grasso's shape-shifting practice is a conviction that creativity is communal. He jokingly calls it his ant-pile theory: millions of us scurrying around, grabbing fragments of inspiration and carting them back to the colony.

"Everybody's just kind of running around, and then somebody finds a little piece of food. And then those ants are like, 'Oh yeah, we're gonna go with you. We like this. We're gonna go get this.'" The metaphor captures his belief in creativity as a constant exchange: a poster on a telephone pole, the logo of a new car, someone's unique shoes. All becoming part of the whole, becoming creative fodder that artists absorb and transform.

He loves that invisible feedback loop, the idea that one of his images might nudge a random viewer down a completely new path. "I put out a project, right? I don't know if somebody today just saw that project that I put out a year ago now, and is all of a sudden really inspired to go and do something."

That communal metabolism is why Grasso refuses to silo himself. "I'll randomly spend six months learning 3D, or a year figuring out Webflow. Each medium refreshes me for the next." Photography trains his eye for light; 3D rewards blank-canvas imagination; web design feeds his obsession with functional beauty. The cross-pollination is the point.

Contradictions as Compass

Spend time with Grasso and you notice a pattern: he gravitates toward contradiction, then makes it generative. Hyper-layered digital art one month, black-and-white film the next. The hardcore solitude of Alaska versus the humming swarm of LA. "Those aren't problems," he insists. "They're proof I'm being honest with where my head's at."

"I think there's a bit of an ebb and flow to it," he says of his practice. "Not all of my work is so skewed visually from reality. I've done documentary photography projects in Italy that are in black and white and shot on film and not edited at all."

Take his ongoing black-and-white film diaries. After years in hyper-layered digital space, he felt the urge to subtract— no color, no Ctrl-Z, no infinite layers. Manual focus, grain, and waiting days for lab scans forced him to slow down. The restraint bled back into his other work; his latest digital pieces feel quieter, more spacious.

Memory as Motivation

Perhaps most striking about Grasso's creative practice is its deeply personal foundation. His art is powered by future nostalgia.

This impulse to preserve moments for his future self runs through projects that might otherwise seem disparate. His recent series "Where One Becomes Many" saw him driving thousands of miles across Alaska, revisiting places significant to his childhood and capturing them through a conceptual lens that explores "multiplicity and self-reflection."

Now living in Los Angeles, Grasso has turned his camera to his new environment, creating black and white street photography that he describes as "romanticizing" his adopted home.

"I kind of started this when I had just entered a new chapter, which is moving to LA. I obviously had plenty of homesick days for quite a while," he says. "I decided to maybe romanticize this place, LA, and the surrounding areas, Southern California, and just kind of shoot it on black and white. Really just focus on what's in the images, be out in the field, not worrying about color."

The project represents another instance of Grasso using art to process a life transition. This time, the displacement from his Alaskan roots to the sprawling urban landscape of Los Angeles. Another life transition, another timestamp.

The Conversation Continues

For all his technical versatility, when pushed on what he hopes viewers take from his work, Grasso circles back to emotional connection rather than conceptual understanding.

"I don't really hope that people feel any specific way," he says. "I am super interested to see the diversity in how people perceive these things." Success, for him, is when his work sparks conversation and disagreement, when "two people are like, 'No, no, no, this is what it's giving.' And the other person's like, 'Nah, I had this thing happen to me, and this is exactly what it felt like.'"

For someone whose work spans SuperRare auctions to gallery walls, you'd expect talk of milestones. Grasso downplays it. "I don't need to be number one or leave some giant legacy," he says. Living authentically, project by project, is enough.

This openness to interpretation aligns with Grasso's broader life philosophy, which centers on authenticity. When I ask how he hopes to grow in the coming year, he pauses before delivering what feels like the thesis statement of his approach:

"As I've gotten a little bit older, I've realized how fucking important that being authentic is to your own happiness, but also to the people that you attract around you. You'll find so much more alignment… if you're just authentic more often."

Connor Grasso's practice is an ongoing conversation between nostalgia and anticipation, solitude and community, addition and subtraction. He's still the kid on Stampede Road, bottling moments for future memory. He's also the digital nomad feeding the global ant pile scraps of wonder. Like the maker he admires, Virgil Abloh, Grasso simply creates, and lets his work “go wherever the fuck it wants."

If psycho-conceptualism means anything, maybe it's simply this: stay open, stay surprised, and keep talking, through every lens you can get your hands on.

Connor’s suggestions for future Weekly Dose of ART guests: Bhare, Adria Tormo, Olivia Pedi.