Erik Mace is a visual artist who combines photography, graphic design, and book arts into a singular tool of inquiry. He experiments with multiple forms of visual communication, curious about how to take advantage of an individual medium’s limitations. The work he produces is tied together not only by a desire to expressly match visual- and language-based tools to subject matter, but also by an interest in how information shapes relationships with ourselves, each other, and our environments.

In 2022, he self-published Slate, the foundation of an ongoing journey into how the act of seeing can deepen respect for the more-than-human world. What began as a simple act of recording marks, gestures, and other environmental curiosities evolved into a robust project about language. Slate introduced a guiding question: what emerges when we’re forced to start over? Slate is a unique manifestation of how multiple modes of visual communication — photography, semiotics, typography — can be employed to allow a reader space to get lost, while also providing clues to find themselves again (or anew).

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 currently holds a leadership position with the Kinship Photography Collective, leading workshops on photography, sequencing, and bookmaking. He is the co-founder of Ramble Editions, launched with Kristen Welles Bartley, as a new vision for collaborative photobook creation and publishing.

Erik’s work has been shown in galleries and exhibitions in New York, North Carolina, and Georgia. His studio is based in Asheville, NC. 

Contact

erik@erikmace.com