Fragmented Reality with Erik Mace
Fragmented Reality
with Erik Mace
Wednesday, April 10th, 2024 at 7 pm EDT via Zoom
Join Erik Mace and our community partner The Bascom: A Center for Visual Arts as we welcome everyone to Fragmented Reality.
For this upcoming exhibiton, Erik mined his photography archive, seeing those images only as raw data to be manipulated. His technique breaks down digital photographs to their binary code, using that code to render new images that are no longer explicitly tied to the original material. The pictures that result from the process are suggestive of landscapes, at once unsettling and hypnotizing, placing viewers in a broad set of alternate realities, each created from hundreds of small, compounding modifications to a single piece of information. With each translation, something is lost and something else is gained. In a world of Fragmented Reality, what happens to the way we perceive with no access to a source of truth?
Completed as the Photography Artist in Residence at The Bascom in Highlands, NC, Fragmented Reality exists in the context of a world where information is skewed at interpersonal, communal, governmental, and societal scales. In an era of dis/misinformation campaigns and widespread institutional distrust, this work examines the tendencies for a “truth” to be reshaped as it moves along a chain of transmission, based on the desires or biases of a participant. Controlling the content, expression, and dissemination of information has long been employed as a method of maintaining power. Photography in particular is so often used as a means of capturing life as it is; the question is, whose version?
Erik will present and discuss selections from his exhibition in further detail, engaging his audience in a timely conversation about truth, perception, and manipulation in visual communication.
Erik Mace is a visual artist who uses photography, graphic design, and book arts as his tools of inquiry. As an experimental visual thinker, he is deeply curious about the power of photography and adjacent mediums and how to take advantage of their limitations. Erik’s work is connected by a sense of restlessness where he seeks out messy processes, delighting in how visual and language-based tools can be expressly matched to subject matter, causing a body of work to rise from the chaos.
Many of his projects germinate from specific personal memories and grow into deeper discussions of place and identity, while other bodies of work are born from a general sense of wonder. Preferring intense focus within each project to a singular visual vocabulary across his practice, Erik is most curious about how to take risks with his subject matter, material, and expectations of mediums.
Erik received his BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University in St. Louis and is an alumnus of the Contemporary Photography program at the ICP in New York. He currently holds a leadership position with the Kinship Photography Collective, leading workshops on photography, sequencing, and bookmaking. In 2023, he launched Ramble Editions with Kristen Welles Bartley, as a collaborative vision for photobook publishing. In 2024, Erik was named the Photography Artist in Residence at The Bascom in Highlands, NC.
Erik Mace
Erik Mace
Erik Mace
Erik Mace
