Exhibitions : Visiting Artist Program : Rickert-Ziebold

Erik Waterkotte
Visiting Artist
Friday, April 21, 2006

Erik Waterkotte
artist statement

"Man looks at his world through transparent patterns or templets [sic] which he creates and then attempts to fit over the realities of which the world is composed.  The fit is not always very good.  Yet without such patterns the world appears to be such an undifferentiated homogeneity that man is unable to make any sense out of it." - George Kelly

In a dialogue of drawing and collage within print media, I utilize diagrammatic language as an abstract visual vocabulary. This vocabulary is fashioned from varying sources such as architecture, physics, topology, and mathematical games.  Although seemingly appropriated, the diagrammatic scenes and schematics pictured stem from a continuous act of drawing and collage as expression and reconstruction.

I am interested in the image of the diagram and schematic from an outsider’s perspective as a visual aesthetic of descriptive detail, order, sequence, and animation.  Between information and experience, plan and physical construction, the diagram carries an intrinsic abstract language as a visual tool and acts as a record of proposed and anticipated events. 

My hope is to acknowledge the diagram as a suggestive visual language and the site of its own cognitive dialogue. I see this idea of the diagram as a spatial fabrication and use it as a metaphor for human consciousness.  A concept similar to that of Derrick De Kerckhove who states, “the mind … works by a kind of ‘inversion of perspective’, not looking out, but looking in … at an internal theatre….”   These works appear in flux and display transition or transformation from existing structures and spaces into dissolution or vice-versa. By layering, overlapping, and erasing I confuse the diagram’s ability to directly communicate and leave its proposition suspended.  This ambiguity questions our perceptions and expectations of information. 

George Kelly, The Psychology of Personal Constructs vol.1, (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1955)
8-9.
Derrick De Kerckhove, The Architecture of Intelligence, The IT Revolution in  Architecture Series, ed. Antonio Saggio,  (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001) 13. 


CV of Erik Waterkotte

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