OPPOSITION-DEFIANT-DISORDER

PICTURED: “Briar Patch,” Cut paper collage by Erik Farseth (2018)

 

OPPOSITION-DEFIANT-DISORDER (2018)
New Works on Paper by Erik Farseth

Opening Reception: Thursday, July 19, 2018 at Ditch Gallery from 6:00-9:00 PM

Ditch
400 First Avenue North, Suite 535
Minneapolis, MN 55401

Phone: (612) 355-4300

Free Admission

GALLERY HOURS:
Viewing by appointment: 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM (Monday through Friday).
  • Call: (612) 355-4300 to make an appointment.

This exhibition ran from July 19 through October 18, 2018 at Ditch Gallery in downtown Minneapolis.


ARTIST STATEMENT:

I am a mixed-media artist specializing in relief prints, zine-making, and cut paper collage. Wielding a pair of scissors in lieu of a paintbrush, new hybridized images are built up from cut paper fragments, freely sampling and remixing old advertisements.  My relief prints (woodcuts and linocuts) mirror my collage work: cutting away excess material to reveal new shapes.

This latest series, Opposition-Defiant-Disorder, is an artistic response to a tumultuous era marked by political extremism and the resurgence of atavistic nationalisms as a force throughout the world.  Created against the backdrop of a nation that seems to be tearing itself apart, Opposition-Defiant-Disorder channels these same feelings of global insecurity into stark, black-and-white relief prints, color-soaked paper collages, and nightmare visions of a world gone awry.

I began working on this latest—ongoing—series during the lead-up to the last presidential election.

Feeling dispirited (and powerless) in the face of Trumpism, I spent many hours holed-up in my art studio. “Year Zero” was the first piece to emerge from the cocoon, a composite image of an infantile emperor striding across a blighted landscape in the shadow of a dying planet Earth.

In the Spring of 2017, I completed a similar collage called “Torchlight Parade,” an image that references the rise of the so-called “Alt-Right.” Two months later, an actual torch-wielding mob of white supremacists marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia chanting “You will not replace us!”

What happened next came as quite a shock: Never in my lifetime did I expect to see the President of the United States praising actual Neo-Nazis as “very fine people.” Nor did I expect to see children being rounded up by Federal agents, separated from their families, and sent to detention camps here in the United States.

In Europe, similar anti-democratic forces have been on the rise in Poland and Hungary, while the Danish government is seriously considering proposals to send migrants away to a remote island.

Humor has always been an important component of my work, but in the age of “alternative facts,” satire has lost all meaning.

 

PICTURED: “This Is No Laughing Matter,” Linocut by Erik Farseth (2017)
PICTURED: “Sounds Like the Name of a Great Party That We Threw Here Once,” Cut paper collage by Erik Farseth (2018)

 

PHOTO GALLERY: