Erica Svec

Erica Svec is fascinated with the mind’s ability to re- contextualize words, ideas, objects and images so that new meanings evolve through narrative associations. The pictorial spaces of Svec’s canvases draw the viewer into a world that is once real and abstracted, strange, yet familiar. The narratives that evolve seem highly personal, and often derive from Svec’s own environment (the objects and space of her studio) and her explorations of her own consciousness. But they also reflect the often perplexing qualities of the modern world.

Her imagery is recognizable in form but contextually out-of-place.Erica Svec reassembles visual clues from both historic and banal origins. There is a presence of a visual lineage that links the artist’s work to art historical influences and there are traces in her work of disparate influence of cubism, surrealism, conceptual painting and painterly abstraction. While cultivating a flatness in much of the picture plane, Svec also plays with depth, subverting and still embracing the rules of perspective so that the viewer experiences shifts between subjects and settings, which often seem to melt into one another.