Bryce Erickson’s habitat and haunts define a place called West Central.  With signposts from Battleford to Borden, Radisson to Rabbit Cabin, Waskesiu to Manitou, Erickson and this circumscribed territory inhabit each other.

 

Absent notions of self framed by dogma, tribe or psychology, Erickson makes art to mark points and connect the dots of a life lived.  The images distill from recurring, contentious memories of his passage through West Central: the who; the where; and crucially, what happened next – all questions with burrs embedded.  A memory stilled by painting yields the aesthetic equivalent of a GPS reference confirmed.

First Born

oil on panel

58.7cm, 36.2cm, 1978

Erickson’s process of deconstructing memory and reconstructing image likens to tipping a balance from disorder to order.  He works to extract metrical constants from the visual phenomena that give impulse to an image.  He builds compositions on structures of lines, armatures, arcs and inscribed geometric forms that relate directly and demonstrably to each other and to the particular dimensions and shape of the painting surface.  Thus, form and content function as necessary components of each other; entropy, uncertainty yield to order.

 

Bryce Erickson paints, draws and editions prints in Saskatoon, Canada.