Pho, who works under the name Photon Tide, is a Mexican-American mixed-media artist exploring consciousness, dreams and the unknown. Self-taught, he pivoted to visual art during the COVID-19 pandemic after years spent playing music, and his work centers on a recurring blank, featureless shadow silhouette set against voids and landscapes.
Born in Mexico, he moved to the United States at age four and studied physics with an astronomy minor before dropping out to pursue music, teaching himself guitar, piano and drums. He adopted the name Photon Tide in college, after losing two close friends, combining the words for a particle of light and a wave as a way of stepping out of the darkness he felt he was in. When the pandemic ended live performance, a friend gave him a cracked copy of Photoshop, and he found in visual art a way to render images he had been unable to translate into music. He calls himself a “method artist”, making nothing that isn't drawn from genuine emotion, and traces his signature shadow silhouette to a psychedelic experience as a teenager that stayed with him.
