exterior · 2026
Urban Jungle
The challenge
A big blank wall and a budget that would not cover all of it. A small mural floating in the middle of a wall that size usually looks like it ran out of money. Here the bare wall became part of the picture: three windows cut into it in paint, each with something from the jungle hanging out, so the empty stucco reads as the outside of the building rather than unfinished space.
The building is 820 Lofts, an apartment building on South West Temple in Salt Lake City. The wall is its long blank side, about 60 feet wide and 35 feet tall, facing the parking lot of the 7-Eleven next door.
The windows were the client’s idea. The job from there was to make three openings that are not there look deep enough to reach into: beveled reveals shaded as if lit from one side, and a flat black interior with nothing in it, so the eye reads depth instead of paint.
Out of each one comes something that has no business in the middle of a city: an alligator tail, a leopard tail, and an elephant trunk. Each casts a soft shadow onto the wall beneath it, which is what lifts them off the stucco and makes them hang in front of it.
The trunk is holding a Big Gulp. The 7-Eleven allowed its lot to be used for site access while the wall was painted, and the cup is the thank you, facing the store it came from.
Freehand aerosol from a boom lift, no stencils, painted between 30 October and 12 November 2026.
