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
- 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.
PHOTO GALLERY: