KARL ERICKSON ART + ACTIVITIES

  • Know No Now

    Know No Now

    TSI/Harland Snodgrass Gallery, Harder Hall, Alfred University, NY

    February 27-March 12

    Know No Now by Karl Erickson is an animation of two puppets, Jelly Pop and Perky Jean, struggling to figure out how to live beyond the present moment of extraction-based capitalism and the resulting environmental destruction. Working through fear (of language, of the other, of time, and of the self), Jelly Pop and Perky Jean arrive at a mental space in which they imagine themselves outside of time, no longer ego driven, and having a long view of existence. The animation is preceded by a lengthy countdown, setting the stage for an alternative sense of time.

  • LearnABCRGBCMYK

    Digital Animation, 2022,  01:04 minutes

    LearnABCRGBCMYK, is an absurdist comparison of the two color-spaces used when creating art and design in the digital environment Red-Green-Blue (RGB, used when creating content for screens) and Cyan-Yellow-Magenta-Key (CMYK, used when creating printed content). The animation depicts the letters signifying  each color space chained together as they are being pulled across another wordly cartoon landscape. The chained letters are overseen by larger letters (ABC) that yell out the names of primary colors. The goal of the animation is to literalize the connections between these color-spaces and to depict the confusion and violence inherent in our language and to make language and color seem strange.

  • Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis

    Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis

    Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN

    June 24 – September 11, 2022

    While digital art has existed since the 1960s, it has experienced increasingly mainstream interest in recent years. Due in part to our shift toward virtual environments during the Covid-19 pandemic, this rise in interest from artists to collectors has also been fueled by the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Featuring works by Kenneth Wayne Alexander II, Karl Erickson, Coe Lapossy, Sarai Payne, and Anthony Sims, Another Dimension provides a glimpse into the emerging digital art scene in Memphis. This exhibition explores the ways in which digital mediums open up a new range of possibilities for artists, from creating virtual environments to reaching new, global audiences, and how artists can create alternative physical and psychological spaces in the digital realm.

    Over the past twenty years, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has showcased digital art. In 2002, the museum commissioned video art pioneer Nam June Paik to create his towering work Vide-O-Belisk. Paik’s early adoption of analog video and the use of television sets as art objects in the early 1960s prefigured the utilization of digital media and tools by artists two decades later and even the way we continue to engage with digital technologies today. In 2015, the Brooks hosted the dynamic exhibition The Art of the Video Game organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which traversed the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium. Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis builds on this legacy.