Trust Your Intuition: Coldie's Kinetic Collage

In Coldie's childhood home there was a stereopticon, the Victorian ancestor of the View-Master, handed down through his grandparents until it reached a kid who couldn't leave it alone. He'd hold it to his face and fall into the card loaded inside, a street market somewhere like Taiwan, rendered in still 3D.

"You're transported into the street market," he says. "I would just stare into that thing and zone out into a sense of being in there."

It was a 3D VR scene decades before VR was a thing. A flat card most people would have shelved, and inside it, for anyone paying attention, a whole world you could step into. That was the thing about Coldie early on: he was always paying attention. The fascination with the illusion of depth stuck at a very early age, but so did something underneath it, a habit of noticing what other people walked past. His whole life, he says, is full of small moments like that.

He was not an art kid. He played twelve years of baseball, loved basketball most of all, and still does, and could pick up almost any sport by nature. Art was just something he did because he was bored in class.

In grade school he was named the top artist among the boys, and when the teacher handed him the little pin, he genuinely asked if it was a prank. "Is this a joke?" The teacher told him to shut up and stand in line.

The signals were there, though, if you knew to read them backward. In a high school darkroom he made a composite of a girl in his class holding a giant twenty dollar bill, and titled it ‘Big Money’. He found it recently in a box of old keepsakes and stopped cold. It fit perfectly into Filthy Fiat, the currency project that would energize him decades later. He'd been making his own art long before he decided he was an artist, and strangely enough, the intuition was running well before he started listening to it.

Coldie is, by his own description, deeply tuned to intuition. He notices the small things, a word from a conversation echoing back at him off the television a moment later, what he calls little bleed backs from the ether. When they come, he stops and pays attention.

"As woo-woo as this might sound," he says, he thinks there are conspiring energies out there, or a higher self looking down, able to ring some little cosmic bell when he needs to notice something. He's heard it throughout his life. Sometimes it leads nowhere in particular. Sometimes, he says plainly, it has done more than that. His intuition, he tells me, has literally saved his life, and that conviction became the basis for a piece he made called Trust Your Intuition.

The part that makes it a practice rather than a superstition is what he does with the signal, which he welcomes.

"You get these little things and you're like, okay, I see that message, and now I want this to keep happening," he says. "Yes, give me more." The signals sharpen the more you say yes to them. He stays awake to them without tipping into neurosis, and cool opportunities, he says, tend to follow.

The clearest example of following the signal came out of a disaster. In art school he'd learned gel transfer, a delicate way to lift digital ink off paper and marry it to canvas, and years later he was making pieces with it. The first took him sixty hours and came out perfect. The second failed. Thirty hours in, he pushed too hard, and half of it flaked off the canvas, ruined.

He threw it in the trash. Then he stood there looking at all that lost time, unable to let it go, and a thought arrived from nowhere.

"You need to blowtorch the canvas."

He listened. He burned away the ruined half, salvaged what was left, and the piece sold in a local gallery for six hundred dollars. The failure became the whole aesthetic of the series after it, anaglyph gel transfers, blowtorched canvas, gold leaf. It was the same lesson the universe kept teaching him. Back in 1998 he'd built a Shaquille O'Neal fan site out of an HTML book, and Sports Illustrated listed it in a Shaq cover story beside the official Shaq.com. He'd never have known if a friend hadn't spotted his family's domain in the magazine. You can make weird shit, he learned, and you just don't know where it will end up. Later, cranking out covers at LA Weekly on half-hour deadlines, he hand-lettered a Tenacious D cover entirely in French's mustard until the whole building smelled like it, and it won an honorable mention from the LA Press Club. The trick was always the same. Trust the strange idea. Salvage the accident.

Filthy Fiat began as a hole in the ground. Coldie lives in the woods, where forest fires are a real threat, so he buried a box with two hundred dollars in single bills, insurance for a hotel room if the house ever burned. Years later he dug it up to check on it and found he'd buried it wrong. The money was a solid chunk of white mold.

The bank threw him out, calling it a biohazard, and promised a Treasury bag to exchange the ruined bills that never came. So he broke the mold-brick open to see what was inside, and that was the moment it clicked.

"Each of these bills is a one-of-one piece of art created by nature and the elements," he says. Every bill carried its own metadata, its year, its origin, its particular bloom of white or black mold, how much of it survived. It was beautiful, and it was a perfect illustration of what fiat currency actually is. A bill nobody will accept is worth nothing. He got sixty-four of them professionally graded by PMG, a currency authenticator that almost never touches anything non-standard, now slabbed and certified as Filthy Fiat bills by Coldie.

He didn't plan any of it. He followed the accident, the way he always has, because the alternative, to him, is the only real failure. "The worst thing with art is indifference," he says. When an old woman at a local show came up to tell him how much she hated his work, he thanked her, and meant it. She was feeling a lot, and he appreciated that.

For most of his life, Coldie faked depth. He fooled the eye with 3D glasses and lenticulars and anaglyphs, cards and screens that pretended to have a third dimension. Now he wants to hand you the real thing, and let you put your hands on it.

His mantra lately is ‘touch the art,’ an inversion of the oldest command in every gallery. At a recent opening at Eterno Gallery in Lisbon, with Truly and 100 Collectors, he built two ways to break the rule. One was a large magnetic collage of Jack Dorsey with 3D spacers, big eyes and mouth, that visitors rearranged all night. He'd come back half an hour later and find it completely different. The other was a machine, a touchscreen running a Three.js scene where anyone could move his collage pieces through X, Y, and Z space, compose their own face, print it, and walk away with a piece he'd signed on the spot. There was a line all night.

"Don't touch the art has always been said throughout history," he says, "but now it's the opposite." Give someone permission to do the forbidden thing, and they leave with a connection that a wall of untouchable art could never give them.

It closes a circle that started with a boy and a stereopticon. He fell into a flat card once, alone, and spent a life learning to build that feeling for other people. Now he isn't satisfied to let them look. He hands over the tools and asks them to reach in.

Coldie says: “I love looking at ancient maps. There is so much detail that has been lost over the centuries and its very curious to decipher what their symbols and messages meant. There is a lot packed in there.

Collecting culture has really been taking off. People want to own a piece of what they personally find value in. For most of the world, that means collecting physical artifacts. While we see this in TCG like Pokemon, we are seeing it in the art space with Beeple, ChazzGold, and Evil Biscuit releasing crypto art on physical cards.

Overall excited about how artists are interpreting their mediums in unique new mediums. Seeing artists explore and evolve is what its all about. Lean into those who are branching out and taking chances. Being an artist is a forever journey and you just might be surprised and drawn in by a new direction by an artist you follow.”