About the Artist

Wes Modes is an artist and high-tech runaway. In various lives, he is a sculptor, writer, performer, artist, and mischief-maker.

Modes is an eight-year Burning Man veteran and a founder of the Costco Soulmate Trading Outlet in Black Rock City, an enterprise that has brought hundreds of people together at Burning Man.

Modes has a irrepressible sense of adventure. He collects shiny baubles, pieces of rusty junk he finds on his wanderings. He hops freight trains and gets in trouble.

His favorite places are the Muni tunnels, the metal scrap heap at the dump, the china basin wastelands, old military bases, abandoned old houses, ancient antique stores, urban desolation, the magic places where anything can happen.

Modes lives in Felton, a village in the hills above Santa Cruz, California, in a little cabin he's been fixing up for years, working in a converted travel trailer. He still does occasional work in his former shop above the carriage house at the Big Yellow House, a long-running art and food cooperative he founded in Santa Cruz.

He is a writer, a cook, a radio star. He works to spread whimsy and irreverence. He schemes. He spraypaints subversive messages on the sidewalks. He is a founder of The Spoon, an international storyteller's group. He spins off wildly impractical ideas and then does them.