Erik Mace is a visual artist who uses photography, design, and book arts not to record the world as it is, but to activate questions about how we see, interpret, and construct reality. Process is central to his work — he often starts with photographic material and subjects it to iterative acts of disruption. These interventions introduce error and ambiguity as productive forces, allowing new visual and conceptual structures to emerge. His practice begins when images stop behaving as evidence and instead function as propositions, prompts, or systems of thought.

Erik’s individual projects grow out of this ongoing experimentation. Bodies of work often evolve slowly, shaped by accumulation and revision rather than predetermined outcomes. What matters most is not resolution, but attentiveness: staying with uncertainty long enough for unexpected relationships to surface.

In 2024, Erik was named the Photography Artist in Residence at The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts. While in residence, he questioned the expectation of photography to hold inherent truth, seeing images only as raw data to be manipulated. His process broke down digital photographs to binary code, transformed the data, and ultimately rendered new images that were no longer explicitly tied to the original material. The pictures that resulted from the process placed viewers in a broad set of alternate realities, each created from hundreds of small, compounding modifications to a single piece of information. The solo exhibition of this work, Fragmented Reality, combined experimental photography, design, and language to ask the question: what happens to the way we perceive and respond with no access to a source of truth?

Erik received his BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University in St. Louis and is an alumnus of the Contemporary Photography program at the ICP in New York. He is a founding member of the Mall R.A.T.S., a collective of artists and curators transforming unused mall spaces into exhibition spaces. He has also led workshops on photography, sequencing, and bookmaking with the Kinship Photography Collective.  

Erik’s work and writing has been published in Studies in American Culture, Southern Cultures, Lenscratch, and Murze Magazine and been shown in galleries and exhibitions in New York, Berlin, North Carolina, and Georgia. His studio is based in Asheville, NC. 

Contact

erik@erikmace.com | Instagram