14 years ago I was in art school and this is the straightest line I can draw. This was DOOM's day, this is the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist. Today, this is the straightest line I can draw. So nothing's changed, right? Except that everything has changed. The shake developed out of a single-minded pursuit of poignolism, just years of making tiny dots. I'd hold the pen tighter and the dots used to look like dots and then they eventually look like tadpoles and so I would continue to hold the pen tighter and my hand would still shake and I'd hold the pen tighter still and this eventually caused so much pain and joint issues I had trouble holding anything. I left art school and then I left art completely. A few years later I just couldn't stay away from art, I got back into it and I went to a neurologist this time to have the shake checked out and I was quickly diagnosed with permanent nerve damage and he took one look at my squiggly line and said, well, why don't you just embrace the shake? So I did, I went home and grabbed a pencil and just started to let my hands shake and shake and I started making all these scribble pictures and it felt great even if it wasn't the art I was passionate about. But once I embraced the shake I realized I can still make art. I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted. So I began experimenting with different methods where the shake wouldn't affect the work and I discovered if I worked in a larger scale with different materials, my hand wouldn't really hurt. I went from having a single approach to art to an approach to creativity that has just completely changed my artistic horizons. This was the first time that I realized embracing a limitation can actually drive creativity and I wondered could you become more creative than by looking for limitations? What if instead of painting on a canvas I could only paint on my chest? Or would if instead of painting with a brush I could only paint with cruddy chops? Or would if instead of making art to display on a wall I had to destroy it? This destruction idea turned into a year-long project I called Good By Art where each and every piece of art was destroyed after its creation. By limiting my theme to destruction I let go of the tangible outcome and saw new possibilities where art didn't have to be tangible or serious or permanence. In the beginning I focused on forced destruction like this image of Jimmy Hendrix made it over 7,000 matches that burned in one minute and then I opened it up to new things where art was destroyed by itself. I looked for temporary materials like Oreo filling, spitting out food, cheese whizz or frozen wine. The last iteration of destruction was to produce something that never actually existed in the first place. So I laid candles out on a table and I lit them and I blew them out and I repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles. Then I took the videos and assembled them into the larger image. So the end image never actually existed as a physical hole. It was destroyed before it ever existed. The destruction riff opened up a whole new phase of creativity for me. Now when I run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped I move from frustration to anticipation really quickly because I know something amazing might come of it. We live in pretty unpredictable times and our ability to create is the most powerful tool we have to attain security. Limitations may be the most unlikely places to harness creativity but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted norms. And instead of telling each other to seize the day maybe we need to remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation. Thank you.