Eric Cain

Artist Statement: 
I make screwball history paintings concerned with ideas of deception, illusion, delusion, facades, conspiracy theories, faulty perceptions, even faultier logic, slight of hand, trickery, mind control, and outmoded systems. I question how such devices both strengthen and undermine mechanisms of power, and how they are both cause and consequence of the current state of psychic instability. Instability remains an important impetus for change and transformation. I make images that convey the impossible situation of a stable instability, or an unstable stability. I am not interested in teaching lessons or providing answers. I want to convey a sense of the beautifully bewildering complexity and comic ridiculousness of life in the 21st century, to create utopian visions that masquerade as satirical, dystopian fantasies. Through the combination of chance, an insistent materiality, and the deliberate mash-up of visual vocabularies I propose unsolvable puzzles. I am interested in how models of reality are constructed from an endless deluge of sensory input and received information. The idea that what we accept as our reality may not be as real as we believe, that it is in fact quite mutable, continually re-presents the possibility of many possibilities.
Bio / Description: 

Born into a small Midwestern existence, grew into a certain presumptive bravado and reluctant utopianism. Embracing oddities from everywhere, humbuggery and legerdemain, and an aesthetic of the operational. Learning that things do not have to add up in order to count.Air Jordan 1 GS

Phone: 
217-377-5986
Address: 
209 S Water St, C