ERIDAN

Artist Statement

ERIDAN is the collaborative efforts of Eri King and Daniel Greer.  Their conceptual framework explores the Everyday within the backdrop of America’s consumer culture.  They utilize rigorous artistic practices by means of labor intensive handmade executions as a simile to the ritualistic nature of consumer culture habits. Combined with their use of disposable material such as snack bags, plastic, or detritus they approach solutions of upcycling and value creation while also touching on questions of beauty within banality and waste.

In their most recent installation A4 Effort, these new works on paper are enlargements of ordinary “blank” surfaces that exist in our everyday lives such as spiral bound college ruled paper, graph paper, or a blank photoshop canvas.  These objects are meticulously reproduced by hand to an enlargement of 4.5:1 (38”x50”) as a towering indication of itself.  As a body of work the structure of creativity itself is revealed, and posits that the creative freedom of a “blank slate” is formed firstly by the implemented parameters of a society.  For example, the structure of ruled paper provides an orderly system for language to exist visually as information, which is analogous to the goals of conceptual art.  Yet, while conceptual art suggests the idea is more important than the art, ERIDAN pulls back one more layer to look at the structure of an idea itself.  With nods to both Sol Lewitt and Claes Oldenburg, these pieces quickly become work about work; art for art.  ERIDAN hopes that in making the Everyday into Art, their viewer will also have the freedom to look at their everyday as Art and in doing so will be able to look past the preconceived structures that we allow to dictate our lives.

With the rise of digital technology, our information systems have rapidly dematerialized leading to the exchange of information existing increasingly within this digital realm.  By dressing the gallery in a digital blank canvas, we rematerialize the platform of a contemporary open discourse where it’s occupants are encouraged to contemplate ideas of freedom, mindfulness, agency, and identity.  As these digital systems become more complex and less comprehensible, it becomes necessary to examine the systems themselves to understand our active roles within them.