ERIK L PETERSON

Engaging ordinary objects and actions that permeate our everyday lives and augmenting their inherent eccentricities, my art surprises the viewer through reflective twinning, monumental scale, comic interplay, and urban camouflage. My work converses with and critiques our manufactured cultural and natural landscapes; I play with the spaces, the people, and the idea of "the public". Here, the real, the living, the found, the created, and the counterfeit collide. 

My public artworks and performative sculptures unpack the systems within urban spaces, employing the ordinary in the service of the extraordinary.  Objects I find and social engagements I observe are suspended in a present context that often goes unnoticed, but is brimming with the potential for humor and quiet tragedy. A slight shift of its elements serves to slow down and focus an over-stimulated citizenry drained by the constantly quickening pulse of imagery and (dis)information. Like an archeologist, I begin to imagine a society based on a specific place and its material culture; in my art I create a potential society. The original culture is still alive, however, and my constructed society, which stakes a claim to reality, inserts itself and is integrated into the living one. For example, in Two Tow’n, an artwork performed on city streets, two tow trucks tow twin red hatchbacks parked directly across the street from each other ad infinitum. Towed around the block, the cars are then dropped off on the opposite sides; the trucks drive off, only to return to tow the cars again in an endless loop. Viewers are treated to a strange stage play, which is enacted under camouflage of everyday events in the life of the city. 

Often, the audience finds that they themselves are the subjects of the piece, whether through self-reflection, physical proximity, or accidental contact.  Pieces ranging from an Orwellian glowing sign depicting ordinary local residents at 30 feet (Face Value) to prototypes for surveillance-camera baby strollers (StrollerVision) to a performance employing four workers carrying two large one-way mirrors on city streets (Large Glass Co.) actively engage art viewers as well as accidental audiences in public spaces. Complicating ordinary objects and events while implicating the participants and viewers of the piece, these works question surveillance culture, advertising, and intimacy in our shared spaces.

I often use non-traditional sculpture materials to activate these concepts. CreamCycle and Soft Palate, a hanging popsicle ring and an ice cream cone in the shape of the human tongue and throat, are edible sculptures cast in frozen strawberry ice cream that viewers literally and figuratively consume. In Relativity Tweet, gallery goers received a Tweet, which rewrote, in 140 characters, Buckminster Fuller’s 264 word telegram that explains Einstein’s Theory to sculptor Isamu Noguchi in 1936. The viewers' interaction with (and within) my works becomes an intriguing cultural experiment. Mixing everyday objects and situations with an interactive public, a wryly self-reflexive alloy is produced. The artwork that emerges is the alchemy of the real and imagined, an absurd chimera of what could be, what might be, and what already is.