Hailing from the high desert of the American Southwest, thr33som3s is both the enigmatic persona and living project of the pseudonymous artist whose broad conceptual art practice combines elements of gouache painting, generative art, performance art, online communities, and innovative collector interactions with proprietary code. Through the prism of America’s favorite pastime, thr33som3s’s work interrogates larger systems within the American tradition, particularly forced nostalgia and the conflicting paradoxes of American identity. 

thr33som3s grew up in isolation as a small boy, living without running water and electricity in the mountains. Removed from what he describes as “normal life,” he took refuge in fiction and baseball. This led him to create an imaginary universe in which baseball teams are composed of their eponymous entities, such as rosters of towering giants for the San Francisco Giants or anthropomorphized felines for the Detroit Tigers. 

It is from these earlier fantasies that thr33som3s, who learned to paint later on in his 40s after a career in baseball, continues to draw from. At the core of this project, thr33som3s defaces vintage baseball cards with gouache paintings to create teams that are outlandish, idiosyncratic, humorous and often subversive. His first team, the Exes, is composed of one person’s entire roster of exes, all dumped for reasons ranging from being a bad kisser to living in an RV (the latter of which may or may not be autobiographical). These paintings, with their style of gritty, bastardized expressionism, oscillate between absurdist imagery, like portraying a team of pregnant men, to blistering social commentary, like defrocking Catholic cardinals and repurposing them as Boy Scout leaders on a Boy Scouts team. 

As part of the project's conceptual performance, teams interact and are collected by a dedicated community with members who embody the roles of individual players, managers, and franchise owners. Regularly meeting in The Grotto, a fictional 1970s cocktail lounge, hosted on Discord, thr33som3s and his collectors participate in an ongoing and constantly expanding narrative that responds to thr33som3s as the “benevolent god” of this universe, randomized events, and proprietary code. All works provide future value and utility, allowing collectors to burn them for exclusive access to new works or conceptual exercises, such as burning works throughout Chanukah to keep a digital menorah alight for the promise of a future albeit unknown utility. 

In tandem with his performance-based community, his generative art project thr33zi3s is the culmination of all his work. In this project, thr33som3s creates new paintings determined by code interactions with his collectors, creating by hand new amalgamations of elements from all past works. Depending on the window of opportunity afforded to them by thr33som3s, collectors might burn work in order to remove a trait or add a new one, which is dictated to thr33som3s who repaints the physical before minting again. 

Through these various intersections of conceptual, performance, and generative art, thr33som3s has created a prolific body of work that blurs the boundaries between physical and digital and constantly evolves the interactions between collector, artist, and code unlike any other contemporary artist. 

thr33som3s currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.