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A SOLO EXHIBITION BY ERIDAN

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The Catskills Gallery is pleased to present Free*, a solo exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Eridan,  a collaborative team composed of Brooklyn-based artists Eri King and Daniel Greer. Free* is a body of work that examines the connection between modes of representation, communication strategies of mass media and capitalism, and its global implications to everyday life. The asterisk symbol used in the exhibition title Free* is silent when read but alerts the reader that a disclaimer is to be addressed.  This exhibition is that disclaimer. 

For this exhibition, Eridan features a collection of artworks that utilize popular media, manufactured plastic goods, and found objects that explore visual and material culture’s symbolic and historical power. The fictional characters and iconic symbols double in their forms, transforming from paintings to sculptures, and navigate through the relationship of 2D media to mass-produced goods. Free* depicts life under an emergency, refracting it through lenses of fantasy and entertainment. It is a cautionary allegory that explores how culture imposes itself on everything and is then weaponized and deployed to manufacture collective thought and action.

Free* draws from fiction and unpacks how invented ideas are internalized and then translated into a reality. The artworks’ maximalist style—vibrant colors and bold optical patterns—alludes to the disorienting experience inside a casino, a mall, or Disney theme park; institutions teasing the desire of the “American Dream” for profit. Synthetic plastic materials also play a critical role in both paintings and sculptures. Plastic materials such as acrylic paint, mass-produced toys, packaging, acrylic carpet, vinyl, tarp, and PPE occupy the gallery space. Each artwork uses plastic to construct scenes of destruction and conveys how artificial materials and imagined worlds made by humans have the power to create and destroy. 

Within the exhibition, six acrylic paintings from Eridan’s End of the World series present contradictory motifs,  suggesting pop culture’s impacts on the human mind and the environment. The paintings feature some of the most recognizable American icons—Mickey Mouse, Jerry (Tom’s foe), and corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid man. These fictional figures, which explicitly target children, often anthropomorphized and wholesome, push slow and silent messages. In the paintings, references to technological tools such as smartphones and Photoshop generate another layer of information construction and consumption. The remainder of the gallery features an array of mixed-media assemblages portraying ironic dichotomies. A mandala is born of toy guns. Carpet flames rise in conflict with comfort. These contradictions undermine violence and blur the reality of life and death. 

 Free* aims to illuminate the involuntary assimilation process utilized by corporate myth-makers to construct consent. This seismic force shapes us from birth and reshapes the world as we find ourselves amid the Anthropocene. Free* propositions itself as neither true nor false. Instead, it questions the nature of representation itself, as a reproduction told by an unreliable narrator.