Statement

My work is concerned with declaration. Not with what is said, but with the conditions under which saying something makes it so. Language, symbols, and objects function as performatives. They enact, assert, classify. I examine what happens when such utterances are placed in contexts that drain their force. When a name fails to fit its object. When certainty arrives without adequate grounds. When conviction and situation do not fully coincide.

Across painting, drawing, film, and installation, each medium finds a different register for the same suspicion. The paintings declare. Image and text placed together with full conviction, in contexts that don’t fully cooperate. The text drawings talk. Expressive, conversational, catching language mid-reach. The films let absurdity play out in real time, following a logic that is internally consistent and quietly wrong. The installations put the body inside the system, making classification something you move through rather than something you observe.

Painting already arrives loaded with inherited convictions about what matters and why, and those convictions are surprisingly easy to unsettle. The work marks the exact point where an assertion begins to misfire. Not a collapse, but a slight insufficiency. The mechanism remains intact. It just stops holding.

Erickson’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Flag Art Foundation (NY), the NARS Foundation (NY), and the Kemper Art Museum (MO) and featured in international film festivals, including the Around Film International Film Festival (Berlin). He holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA in Art & Design from the University of Northern Colorado. His work has received numerous awards and grants, including the John T. Milliken Foreign Travel Graduate Award, and was recognized as a finalist for Best Experimental Film at the Around Film International Festival. He has presented lectures at institutions such as Washington University in St. Louis and performed readings at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (NY). His work is included in the Director’s Collection of the School of Art and Design at the University of Northern Colorado.