Visiting Artist: Erik Waterkotte

Wednesday, February 19, 2020
South Kohrman Hall
room 2121 at 5:00 p.m.

Erik Waterkotte's work is an exploration of popular culture, myth, and fantasy as conveyed through printmaking and mixed media. His work engages ideas and events that blur the line between fantasy and reality. Utopias and dystopias, religious extremism, cults, alchemy and mysticism, are all fodder. Juxtaposed and submerged in his prints and mixed media works are images from rock and roll films, heavy metal album covers, the Mormon Tabernacle, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, and ancient ruins. In his book The Philosophy of Magic, Arthur Versluis explains that “magic…is a reflection of eternal principles and as such must exist so long as there are cultures.” Using print media, collage, and digital applications, Waterkotte creates layered imagery that both elucidates and obscures. By overlapping and layering the imagery in his work fluctuates in-and-out of being. The interstitial processes of printmaking allow him to fabricate, reduce, and distort imagery in order to create temporal, ephemeral, and shifting works. He is interested in images that reference both beauty and terror, images that walk the line between representation and abstraction, form and formless.

Erik Waterkotte is an Associate Professor of Print Media in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.