In Conversation with Erik Mark
Sandberg
Interview by Michela Bevivino
Visuals by Erik Mark Sandberg
Furry faces and figures, is it about hiding or revealing their personality, thoughts and emotions?
There is a metaphorical veneer to the flesh being rendered or “styled” in a plush toy or hirsute texture. The figurative treatments referenced are a type of visual signifier reflecting aspects of those ideas or the internal psychology of the figure. In other works, it can represent a groomed persona as experienced in the ersatz reality of the digital world.
We know that cars and their interiors have always been a great source of inspiration for you. What role do your characters take in relation to these environments?
The car is a reference I have come to understand on some level. Car culture is something I inherited early on from my family. Automobiles and their interiors hold particular importance and often serve as a sanctuary for private discourse and an extension of identity. They have helped shape life moments, and the automobile can function as a physical and psychological prosthetic.
What themes or feelings do you feel you are exploring the most with your artworks?
I am interested in suggestion. The paintings seek to offer an idealized slow-moving sunset surreality. The uncanny nature of the paintings allow for ambiguity within the pictorial codes loosely themed or in reference to daily recreational activities, love in the modern age, identity, and the vernacular of advertising.
Digital, 3-D modeling, printmaking, photography, drawing, and collage…. is there one tool that prevails over the others in expressing yourself?
I think there is optimism or a perceived level of confidence instilled to visually problem solve with a diverse toolbox. The various interdisciplinary tools can help alleviate the challenges when trying to find the correct language of an image. However, through painting, I have come to render the internal exchanges between ideas and visualization more personally.
I would describe your work as ‘positively uncanny’; Images that are distant from us but at the same time exude an enormous sense of familiar tranquility. Do you relate to this?
I do relate to this. I am interested in the transaction between the environment and the individual and the forces that govern both. The sky-colored gradations in the work speak to a momentary idealism evoking pause, much like the random shared impulse to photograph the sublime of a slow-moving sunset. Shared emotions or commonalities between us can provide an existential understanding.
The pink color is truly prevailing in most of your works, what does this color embody for you?
I think color tends to be a close friend of the psyche, and many of the portraits try to visualize the internal workings of the figure. Pink is a tint that holds unique psychology. The color can signify pop, punk, pretty, and powerful simultaneously. Culturally through the centuries, it has gotten codded in many ways. I like the use of it for these reasons, and it can greet the viewer politely and then suggest a mischievous complexity.
How are your life and your art similar, and how are they not? Do you feel a connection between what you depict and yourself?
The paintings tend not to be autobiographical. I do not own anything that is pink besides art. The California Dreaming vibe and some of the recreational activities depicted in the work are loosely about personal observations and experiences. I have lived and worked out of Los Angeles for most of my life, and the ideas are an output from the daily input the culture provides.
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