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Artist Statement

My narratives emanate from personal recollections, memories and dreams that are often overlooked in significance. The content of my work attemtps to evolve past the personal by conversing with psychological issues of aging, death and dying, loss and longing, father and son relationships, to name a few. More specifically, I often deal with the hopeless and tragic, and create lush and visually seductive images that function as triggers and containers for these thoughts. Most of paintings utilize figures in spaces to evoke these ideas, often blurring the line between nostalgic projections and actual recollections by paying homage to the literal, theatrical and cinematic, and surreal. As I trace my fragmented thoughts I recognize that I have deceived myself, obsessed over, invented, stolen from other's people experiences and assimilated them into my work out of revisionist need. Like myth, tha narrative need not be taken literally to speak of a real, lived past. This luxury (or abuse of) revising one's own past allows one the creative potential to use these forms as "psychological markers"

In "Cutter of Lilacs'" center panel (right), there is a forcing of three realities: lived, remembered and projected (as in the case of fear) together. The center panel has several fragmented histories that site my grandfather's procession into old age (the slow walking, the guide dog and mechanized transport, fleeting moments of hospitals, visiting family, and fears of abandonment and rundown institutions where he wanders aimlessly). The panel shows his thoughts and fears put into competition with one another, fighting for supremacy in his mental clarity. This inability to separate these thoughts is often used in the diagnosis of many mental illnesses. I refer to this approach "psychological cubism" for how it portrays the range of realities it collages. It attempts to provoke a domino effect that begins with the personal and moves outwardly to the historical (the break down of the individual, the breakdown of generation, the breakdown of the institution and the breakdown of the narrative of it all on a grand level, etc.). The comparison I am interested in are these conflicting realities and forcing them into a dialogue and opening up the time within the image. The two wings of “Cutter of Lilacs’” bookend the center panel with two very real physical realities (the place as it stands today) and think of an empty space as a reliquary for lost narratives and projected experiences. Again there is a move from small to large "containers": ( the memento that signifies the memory, the owner who owns the memento, the living space the owner inhabits, etc.) In Mama’s Boys (see paintings), the image comes from a dream where three men are reading or singing in an institutional place that is abandoned and run down. The mourning visitors hover over an empty hospital bed while being consumed with memories and emotions of the deceased that become the surrogate for the real person. In addition, the visitors come to a place that is both psychologically important to them and unaffected by their presence. Like a corpse, the place (here Dixmont State Mental Hospital outside of Pittsburgh) is but a shell of its former presence. In this way, these institutional places take on spiritual significance and become the modern holy ruins by encouraging pilgrimages, remembrance and meditation.

The setting speaks to the failure of technological and institutional promises which suggested we might be emancipated from pain or loss. (The abandonment of these places might be taken as recognition of their failure.) This realization leads us back to emotion and traditional rituals of mourning- even in steelworkers. The cyclical return back to a base human response is the way out of the downward spiral. The paintings don't just portray " the mental hospital didn't work". Rather there is a sort of hermeneutical growth from these experiences which keep us returning to our humanness and, as a result, the relationship to our lives and the lives of our ancestors. It is my hope that these paintings allow me to investigate how my experience is contextualized with that of history.

- Bruce Erikson (2005)

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