ERIC CONRAD
JUNE 2-30, 2023
Snap Space Gallery
Parade
I began my artistic career studying traditional figurative painting and creating large scale paintings of myself and my friends that dealt with power structures within human relationships. While I no longer depict the figure in a naturalistic way, my concern with scale, the human form as subject, my interest in body language, and my curiosity about psychology and the human mind has continued to inform my artistic practice.
For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with clothing, fabrics, and sewing. As a little boy, I picked out my own clothes from second hand shops. I began sewing clothes as a teenager. And I use second-hand clothing in my work that has been picked out, purchased,
worn and then discarded by people I have never met. For me, these items of clothing become important and valued evidence of lives lived with their own residual history, mystery and a new purpose beyond their original intentioned use. In my work, crestfallen figures and their outfits are sewn out of used clothes, then stuffed, cut apart, and recombined. Arrested in bound, codependent relationships, heaps of figures and forms are mixed-up into a fragile communities of tangled scraps. They are forced into precarious structures where there is the potential for reconciliation, acceptance, and collapse.
The existential scenarios depicted in my absurd sculptures are melodramatic and psychological. Maybe these creatures cling to each other out of a desire to love or be loved, to dominate, or to comfort. The abject and funny relationships emerge also as metaphors for internal conflict and contradiction. My practice is interdisciplinary, and I enjoy moving between materials and processes. In larger works, the scale of the fabric has been blown up along with the scale of the figures themselves. I hand weave materials as fast as I can to create inevitable errant lines, and other blemishes. I use big metal sleeping-bag zippers that connect body parts that suggest childhood camping trips and slumber parties. I hope these happy/sad manifestations appear both familiar and unknown; the everyday made strange.
I think of my recent installation in the 2021 SACO Chilean Biennale and my recent floor/wall leaning pieces as remnants of difficult emotional experiences. They are beacons or signals, and potential receivers; signs constructed to invite and focus spiritual experience or create
connection. I want to make a space where things that are absurd, funny, tragic, cliché, grotesque, ecstatic, awkward, and spiritual can exist together simultaneously; where transformation is possible. Scraps of found clothing, plastic flowers, and bits of detritus become precious artifacts to me. I think about them as objects, as marks, and as a record.
About the Artist
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Eric Conrad completed a BA in Mathematics and Fine Art from Kalamazoo College in Michigan and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rhode Island School of Design were he received an MFA in Painting/Printmaking in 2000. He has shown his sculptures, drawings and installations nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Chile, New York, Colorado, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida, Oregon, Illinois, Iowa, California, Hungary, Poland, and New Zealand. He has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a number of artist residencies including the Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Anderson Ranch, ISLA (Chile) and Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium). He created a solo public art exhibition at the Miami-Dade International Airport and was recently invited to create a large public installation as part of the SACO 1.0 Contemporary Art Biennale in Antofagasta, Chile. Eric is lives and works in Kansas.