Spike Speckle

Artist Statement

"What Defines Value? Ask The Artist"I work at the intersection of canvas, material goods, and social provocation, using raw depictions of currency and everyday objects to interrogate how modern society assigns and views value. With an academic background in both technology and language, I treat the gallery as a laboratory for testing what happens when familiar systems of value are dismantled and rebuilt in unfamiliar and unsettling forms.My practice centres on raw, unflinching depictions of currency. Dollar signs, direct representations of value amounts, rendered through a layered process of gritty pastel and wax over acrylic. I build up surfaces in dense, textured passes, so the imagery feels excavated rather than painted. This layering is a way of embedding currency with a kind of visual weight and residue, in the same way that money itself carries the fingerprints of everyone who has handled it. The result is a brash, confrontational aesthetic. Saturated and abrasive, one that mirrors the blunt cultural power money holds. With each painting, value climbs while scale and structure decrease, the work growing more valuable even as it shrinks into something smaller and less resolved. By refusing polish and instead pushing toward friction and grit, I want the work to feel like an artifact pulled straight from the economy it lives within.Upon the completion of Series A, my upcoming Series B takes this same unflinching inquiry off the canvas entirely. Rather than depicting value, I'm intervening directly in it. I will be acquiring natural diamonds at market value, actual objects of immense, historic, and culturally sacred worth and selling them for next to nothing, staging the same collapse between price and worth that drives my paintings, but as a lived, irreversible act rather than an image of one. This is my value system taken to its logical extreme. Value was never inherent to these objects, it's a story we've collectively agreed to tell, and one that can just as easily be reconstructed and reintroduced into the world in a new configuration. By handling priceless things with the same brash, unceremonious hand I bring to the surface of my paintings, I want this series to stand as proof that nothing is as stable or as real as we may have thought, that everything we've decided matters is only ever one act away from changing form entirely.

Series A : "What Defines Value?"
Acrylic, Oil, Canvas, Paper

Piece Title: "3"
Size: 60" x 48" (5 x 4 ft)
Type: Oil, Acrylic, Wax, Canvas
Price: $3,000,000 USD (available)

Piece Title: "8"
Size: 12" x 9"
Type: Oil, Acrylic, Wax, Canvas
Price: $8,000,000 USD (available)

Piece Title: "23"
Size: 4" x 4"
Type: Oil, Acrylic, Wax, Canvas
Price: $23,000,000 USD (available)

Piece Title: "67"
Size: 5" x 3"
Type: Oil, Acrylic, Wax, Paper, Tape
Price: $67,000,000 USD (available)

Coming Soon
Series B : "Ask The Artist."
Natural Diamonds

Piece Title: "500"
Type: $500,000 worth of natural diamonds
Price: $1.00 USD (not yet available)

Piece Title: "2"
Type: $2,000,000 worth of natural diamonds
Price: $0.50 USD (not yet available)

Piece Title: "10"
Type: $10,000,000 worth of natural diamonds
Price: $0.10 USD (not yet available)

Piece Title: "30"
Type: $30,000,000 worth of natural diamonds
Price: $0.01 USD (not yet available)

Emerging Artist Biography

Spike is a self-taught visual artist working in layered pastel, wax, and acrylic to explore how value (monetary, cultural, and personal) is constructed, inflated, and dismantled.Their work approaches painting with an interdisciplinary sensibility, shaped by a background that spans literature, technology, and the visceral experience of art.Spike holds a Bachelor's degree in English Literature and postgraduate qualifications in technology and publishing, and has studied perfumery through the Grasse Institute of Perfumery of Grasse, France. Having traveled to more than 200 cities globally to meet with underground artists, Spike draws on firsthand exposure to a vast range of economies, currencies, and cultural attitudes toward wealth and worth. These experiences continue to shape the questions of value at the centre of their work.Prior to pursuing art, Spike spent years working in the corporate sector, an experience that continues to inform their preoccupation with systems of value, exchange, and worth. Drawing on this varied foundation, Spike's practice merges a writer's attention to narrative, a technologist's interest in systems, and a perfumer's sensitivity to composition, resulting in work that is raw, layered, and unapologetically brash.

Contact

Toronto, Canada
[email protected]

Upcoming Works: A Life In Water (Coming 2028)