| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | Having grown up in Calgary, Winnipeg, Nairobi, and Boston, Erik Olson has made planet-hopping a way of life and art. He’s travelled to Turin to work with artist Gordon Halloran on a major painting installation for Canada’s arts contribution to the 2006 Winter Olympics, worked as an illustrator in London, has undertaken a painting and study retreat to Florence, partnered again with Halloran to paint in Chicago’s Millennium Park, and motorcycled through the wilds of British Columbia. That last experience had him photographing and mapping infestations of pine beetles; as he describes it, his entomological interest “began from a visceral, personal experience… that appalling, yet enthralling feeling of seeing a familiar mountain coloured red by the dead pine trees…. I flew a small plane over the High Plateau of central British Columbia. From this height, the significance of the problem is exposed as an almost surreal mosaic of red and grey pine intersected by clear-cuts.”
Olson studied for a summer semester at the British Institute of Florence (2006) while completing his Bachelor of Design from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2007), and won the Bill Crosby and Friends of Emily Carr scholarships. He undertook several residencies, including at the Num Ti Jah Lodge at Lake Louise, the Banff Centre, the Calgary Applied Arts Foundation, and Emma Lake; he also served a Sanskriti Artist Residency in New Delhi.
In Calgary, Olson has mounted the solo exhibitions Landscape Disturbance at the IDEAL Art Space, Assemblages at Summit Fine Art, and Out of India at the Skew Gallery. He has also participated in several group shows including Book Forms at Emily Carr, Redshift: Witnessing the Landscape Change at the Art Gallery of Calgary, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts tour Fresh Paint. He won the Boston Library Respect for Differences competition and two visual arts project grants from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. |