Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
Two site specific sound installations of abandoned and boarded up crawl spaces were created for “Not to Scale”, the Smoke Farm Lo-Fi Arts festival. Together they try to recreate childhood memories of prohibited passages into an underground labyrinth of tunnels, connecting ideas and spaces across great distances. A series of sacred spaces that one could hide away prized possessions/reconnect/bury their past.
International District Tunnel in Seattle, WA
Smoke Farm Tunnel in Arlington, WA
Photos by Cindy Apple (1-3) and Timothy Firth (4-5)
Time lapse of building the “tunnel”
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Thursday, June 30th, 2011
A series of works on paper that examine my childhood fears, hazing, adventures, and other distorted nostalgy.
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Monday, June 20th, 2011
For over 60 days I tried to gather statistics about my mood and a number of factors that I felt impacted it. In an attempt to correlate these two things I would draw and color a self portrait depending on how I felt and keep a tally of the different variables that could affect these moods. These variables included: hours of sleep I had, number of alcoholic drinks, cups of coffee, days since I last had sex, negative thoughts about myself, minutes of mediation, and minutes of exercise. From this data I created a number of stacked area graphs showing the distribution of these feelings by color in regards to each variable over the course of this social experiment. All of the graphs and portraits I collected can be seen on the Quantifying Contentment website.
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Monday, September 13th, 2010
This interactive animation was created with openFrameworks and a series of hand drawn frames of the child.
Childhood Ghosts from Eric John Olson on Vimeo.
The following are still frames from the animation:
Tags: Animation, Childhood, Dreams, illustrations, installations, interactive art, openFrameworks, Software
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Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
This project was inspired by the trash bags stacked up on every street throughout New York City. Walking by these huge, overflowing piles every week, a person can’t help but question how people can create so much “trash”. Also, a person with a vivid imagination, such as myself, cannot help but daydream about these piles of trash taking on a life of their own. To try to help other people imagine just that, I took the iconic eyeballs of Sesame Street’s Big Bird and stuck them on piles of trash throughout New York City.
The project evolved into this series of photographs after more and more questions kept popping into my mind. Questions I needed to ask myself and others. Can we imagine a different potential for these piles of bags? Why do we assume it is trash? Where else do we make similar assumptions in our lives? How is this perspective related to privilege in society? With these questions, observing the reactions of children to the project and reflecting on my previous work as an art teacher in a low income housing development in Seattle, I decided to document the project with a series of photographs taken in NYCHA housing developments throughout Brooklyn and Queens.
Tags: graffiti, Photography, street art
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Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
These photos were taken during the summer of 2010 at Cumberland Island, Georgia. It is a large barrier island housing pristine maritime forests, undeveloped beaches and wide marshes whispering stories of a forgotten past. In an attempt to explore the feelings of loss surrounding my father’s death, I photographed this series of portraits of myself and my partner vulnerably navigating the ruins and maritime forest. Eagles are a reoccurring symbol in my work that reference the relationships we create between those things we revere and ourselves, as a father and his son/a country and its people.
Tags: Photography
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
During the summer of 2009, I decided to try and re-live some of my childhood adventures through the perspective of my niece. This set represents the beginning of my exploration into my childhood dreams and imagination as a way to escape the realities and hardships I experienced growing up, and a way to inspire. Strangely the photos ended up being all focused in parks I explored growing up. I wonder if this is because I subconsciously, and many times consciously, yearn for an escape from the concrete jungle of New York City. I don’t really know but it is always fun to experience something unexpected. Special and most grateful thanks to my magical nieces Faelynn and Tristen for joining me in my exploration.
Acrylic on photograph
A map of the places we visited:
Tags: Childhood, Dreams, Mixed media, Photography
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Monday, February 16th, 2009
The following is the artwork for the latest Man Plus album due the end of summer. I will post some updates when we finish the full layout. The album will be named A History of Ugliness and was partly inspired by an amazing art history book called On Ugliness by Umberto Eco. Jared and I had a series of ideas bouncing from coast to coast until we came up with the idea of having a series of collaged monster heads categorized on the forgotten shelves of an old biologist’s laboratory. I hope you enjoy, also I have heard a few of the rough cuts and the new music sounds as magical as ever.
Tags: Album Artwork, Collage, Mixed media, Painting
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