Hatched in Baltimore, educated in New York City and nurtured in Philadelphia, outsider artist Jsgrites creates images that are at once a product and reflection of the working class, symbolizing its victories and mysteries as well as its failures and shortcomings. Inspired by Automatism, the Situationist’s form of detournment, American primitives and the city of New Orleans, his detritus assemblages are cockeyed glances at the absurdity of everyday life - its joys, sorrows and contemplations. Informed by literature, travel, music, pain, harmony, philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, the work is meant to provoke thought and feeling in the moment, while remaining fluidly relevant with the passage of time. Moreover, there is an undercurrent of longing threaded through the imagery that is meant to remain universal. Still early in his career, Grites’ works have already found homes with collectors around the country and globe.