Bio
Originally from Tacoma, Washington, Eric John Olson is an artist and engineer. His personal work often mirrors his life-long relationship with technology and science and its conflict with art and nature. It is this tension between the logical and emotional and between literal and figurative that animates his art.
Olson’s artworks occupy a world where objects of a child’s imagination are imbued with life and transformed into kaleidoscopic images of blurry photographs, half-remembered and half-rendered. Here we find worlds that are populated by vague memories of landscapes and are peppered with prehistoric and dreamlike creatures. It is also here where we find technical, software driven installations that try to transcend the cold novelty and confront artist’s underlying emotions. Silly, strange, and sometimes “unworthy of serious consideration”, the charm of Olson’s work lies in it’s constant flirting with natural and unnatural disasters. Modern and forward-thinking, yet regressive and irreverent, this complex body of work offers us a “mature” way of building mythologies and mysteries.