Psychic City
Psychic City
The
The
collection
Over the years, Psychic City has become one of David Hochbaum’s most
persistent and evolving bodies of work. What began as a single drawing in
2009 has resurfaced in different forms, silkscreen prints, collages,
installations, and large-scale works, each iteration building upon the last.
While never planned as an ongoing series, Psychic City has returned in cycles, resurfacing when it feels appropriate or inspired rather than as a continuous effort.
In 2009, Hochbaum was invited to create an installation for an art fair in Cologne, Germany. He spent weeks sketching, working through a range of ideas before
developing "At the Gates", a large-scale installation featuring stacked
houses and a swirling mass of arrows.
At the Gates 2009
Among the many drawings that emerged during this period, one stood out, a sharply graphic depiction of a tower of stacked houses. While it was created as part of the brainstorming process, this particular drawing struck him differently from the rest.
It had a striking, graphic quality, bold lines, high contrast,
and a structure that felt ideal for silkscreen. At the time, he
was deeply involved with a collaborative group that regularly
held silkscreen printing events to raise funds for their projects.
Each new event required a fresh screen, and when he looked
at the drawing, he saw its potential. The image was soon
transferred to a silkscreen, initially finding its purpose on
t-shirts at these gatherings before eventually taking on a much
larger role in the evolution of Psychic City.
While experimenting with shirt prints, Hochbaum noticed that when
he inverted the image and flanked the original on either side, it formed an intriguing shape—an upside-down trapezoid that resembled a superhero emblem. When flipped upright, it took on the appearance of a tower, a structure that would become one of the defining forms of the Psychic City series.
Recognizing the potential of this shape, Hochbaum scanned the image, inverted and flanked it in the same manner as his t-shirt prints, and created a new silkscreen featuring three towers in one composition. This allowed him to produce this new shape in an efficient and streamlined way. This new design also led Hochbaum to eventually create the first edition of his Psychic City collection.
Psychic City series 2013
The first Psychic City collection, created in 2013, was produced entirely on watercolor paper using a layered silkscreen printing process. Hochbaum began by laying down a foundation of iridescent gold and white inks, embedding a luminosity that would pulse beneath subsequent layers. Over this, a strong red was introduced, followed by deep black, solidifying the architecture of the cityscape. Each print, created in rapid succession across multiple sheets, carried variations, some more dense, some lighter, allowing the imagery to shift and breathe.As the edition took form, something became immediately clear. The layers of shimmering gold, the stacked structures, and the almost vibrating textures created a visual reverberation, an energy that felt alive. It reminded Hochbaum of his time living in downtown New York, surrounded by the compressed force of creativity, movement, and restless ideas. The city itself had felt like a living, pulsating entity, and this work captured that sensation. When it came time to title the series, Psychic City was an instinctive reaction to that energy, a reflection of a place that wasn’t just seen but felt.
By 2016, the project had expanded into the Psychic City Ghost Series, incorporating medieval woodcut cityscapes, Albrecht Dürer inspired engravings, and photographic elements into composite collages.
A defining aspect of this edition was the choice of material—delicate rice paper inherited from Hochbaum’s wife’s late grandmother. This paper, already carrying a sense of personal and cultural history, became an integral part of the process. Its translucency, when combined with layers of printing and wax treatment, transformed the works into objects that felt like aged navigational charts, their ghostly cities resembling waypoints on lost voyages.
The technique involved printing on both sides of the paper, an approach that allowed details to interact in unpredictable ways once the sheets were soaked in wax. The wax didn’t just preserve the work; it revealed it, bringing hidden layers to the surface and giving the cities a spectral, shifting presence. Many of the pieces contained three to four layers of these treated rice papers, each interacting with the others, as if they were maps that had been redrawn, revised, and rewritten over time.
The project also extended beyond paper. In 2016, Hochbaum was invited to create a storefront sign for HiFi Bar in NYC, a space with deep personal ties. Formerly Brownies, an iconic music venue, HiFi had become a second home. This is where he worked for nearly a decade, met lifelong friends, and where he met his wife. Run by Mike Stuto, the bar fostered a tight-knit creative community, supporting artists and musicians alike.
photos:Mike Stuto
By then, Hochbaum had left New York for Somerville, feeling the inevitable distance from the city’s energy, friendships, and creative networks. HiFi remained a strong connection, and bringing Psychic City into that space wasn’t just another installation gig, it was a way to stay present despite the miles. For the sign, he scaled up the original Psychic City drawing, inverting and repeating it over 25 times until it stretched approximately 20 feet across the storefront. Even though he was no longer in the city, knowing the bar was still alive with rock shows, musicians, and all the energy that had defined that time, it felt like Psychic City had a presence there too—woven into the ongoing rhythm of the place.
In 2017, Hochbaum produced a limited run of Psychic City card sets, featuring five different motifs based on his signature stacked house imagery. The process began with the second silkscreen he had created for Psychic City, the one resembling an emblem or a tower. He digitally rearranged elements in Photoshop, developing five distinct motifs from the original composition. Each design was then printed by Hochbaum himself using an Epson printer on Hahnemühle watercolor paper. Once printed, he meticulously cut each card by hand and signed them individually. Only a handful of these unnumbered sets were made, with variations in black, red, and blue, some featuring small hand-painted details.
In 2018, Psychic City took on another form with the Somerville Summer 2018 Edition. Having lived in Somerville for four years at that point, Hochbaum was actively seeking ways to connect with his new community while channeling the energy of his time in New York. For a local street fair in his neighborhood, he created an edition of 38 unique
small plaques, each a layered silkscreen print on 3 to 4 inch
wooden panels, sealed with clear epoxy resin. The goal was
to create accessible, small-scale works that carried the same
vibrancy and complexity of his larger pieces. Each plaque
was distinct, featuring different color variations and layering
techniques, making every piece a one-of-a-kind extension
of the Psychic City series.
The latest works (2025) in the Psychic City series, including Ghost Town, Sphinx, and The Vastness Noticed Me Notice It, continue the project’s evolution, shifting rather than reinventing. The compositions stretch across wide, horizontal formats, giving the structures a sense of movement, as if the cityscape is rippling or coiling. The repetition of houses, compressed and layered, takes on something of a serpentine rhythm, winding across the surface in a way that feels less rigid, more organic.
Psychic city:Ghost town 2025
Psychic city:Sphinx 2025
Psychic city:The vastness noticed me notice it 2025
At over 40 inches long and up to 30 inches tall, these are some of the largest works on paper Hochbaum has created for the series to date, bringing in more fluid washes of acrylics and ink that soften the edges of the structures. The city isn’t static, it expands, folds, and reforms, refusing to settle into a fixed state. There’s still an architectural density, but also something looser, more open to chance.Like previous iterations, Psychic City reappears when the timing feels right, shifting in material and scale but always holding onto its core. These pieces reflect where the project stands now—rooted in past forms, but still moving forward.