Some years back, Brendan O’Connell had a revelation at a Winn-Dixie. He was in his sophomore year at Emory University, and was spending the summer working at one of the company’s stores, in St. Augustine, Florida, un-loading merchandise from trucks. Usually, his job amounted to what he likes to call a Sisyphean task, because it was hard for him to apply himself to the work with the necessary stick-to-itiveness and zeal. This particular day, however, O’Connell found himself mesmerized by the patchwork of colors and shapes coming off the truck, and by the mosaic that the products created once they were stacked on the Winn-Dixie shelves. In a flash of clarity, he decided that light and color and form are what keep humankind from existential despair and loneliness, and that he wanted to devote himself to capturing that insight in some visual way. It was as if his life path had suddenly presented itself to him at the loading dock. This would have been a magical moment, except that it was interrupted by the store manager, who wrote him up for loafing on the clock.

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