Rehearsal with Erik Mace

Written By Susan Patrice
 

Rehearsal with Erik Mace

Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, May 27th, at 7 pm EDT

Join Erik Mace as he shares new work born from an ongoing inquiry into photography's relationship to truth — and what survives when memories fall apart.

For the past six years, Erik has been introducing corruption into image files, feeding photographs back through their own data, letting digital photographs reorganize, decay, or come apart. In this new exploration of work, he has turned that process on an archive of images he could least afford to lose. What emerges are photographs that behave like memories — unstable, selective, approximate — revealing to him that stopping time was never a true choice.

Together we will explore the following questions:

— What does a photograph promise?

— What is a memory, and what happens when one falls apart?

— Is a misread photograph a failed photograph — or something else?

— What survives when we let time back into an image?

— What does it mean to practice grief before it arrives?

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Erik Mace is a visual artist who uses photography, design, and book arts to activate questions about how we see, interpret, and construct reality. Process is central to his work — he subjects photographic material to iterative acts of disruption, introducing error and ambiguity as productive forces. When images stop acting as evidence, his practice begins.

In 2024, Erik was named Photography Artist in Residence at The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts. His solo exhibition Fragmented Reality broke down digital photographs to binary code, transformed the data, and rendered new images asking what happens to perception with no access to a source of truth.

Erik received his BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and studied at the ICP in New York. He is a founding member of the Mall R.A.T.S. collective and has led workshops with the Kinship Photography Collective. His work has been published in Southern Cultures, Lenscratch, and Murze Magazine, and shown in New York, Berlin, North Carolina, and Georgia. His studio is based in Asheville, NC.

Substack: Notes on Making

Instagram: @erik.mace

Website: https://erikmace.com/

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Susan Patrice

As the founder and director of Makers Circle, Susan Patrice designs and implements arts-informed community initiatives in partnership with non-arts organizations who want to expand their reach and impact through innovative cross-sector collaboration. Makers Circle has a deep passion for the power of the creative process to encourage adaptive change, expand awareness, and open up new ways of seeing and relating. We believe that the arts and artists should play a major role in community regeneration and non-profit advancement. Web design and digital storytelling are foundational to the work we do with non-profits.

https://kinship.photography/
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Time: A Community Conversation