Wesley Ericson
Something Familiar

02.03.22 25.03.22

Wesley Ericson is a drawer, painter, and muralist from Cincinnati, Ohio. He’s working as a professional artist to engage communities through non-profits such as ARTE (Art-Empowerment), where their teams connect with communities to create culturally competent dialogue through large-scale installation based art. An Artworks Cincinnati alumnus, and now practicing professional artist.

His paintings, drawings, and the mural projects that he’s been involved with provide him with the tools to use these mediums to create visual narratives nodding at reality. His pieces take the form of landscapes, figurative works and portraiture. From urban street art scenes to the ocean shores, so much can be discovered on behalf of individuals, communities and environments. Wesley hopes to encourage conversations about viewing life from a variety of lenses, finding inspiration in daily life and translating it to human reaction with visual responses. The images leave clues to the internal conscious and contrasts with one’s life, reflecting on how our environment impacts how we move through space.

During his time at ´ace, Wesley worked on a site specific mural painting project in the outdoors patio of our studio. There, he took the chance of using a plant as the head of Medusa (a very well-known figure taken from Greek mythology) and painted a human-sized Perseus, while also installing a mirror through which the public can view his work.

BIO
Wesley Ericson
2001 | Cincinnati, OH, USA

EDUCATION
2019-2020 | Sinclair Community College & Miami University, USA

EXHIBITIONS
2021 | Student Power, V2 Gallery Artworks, Cincinnati, USA
2021 | The Way We See Ourselves, Artworks, Cincinnati, USA
2021 | Harvest, The Art Garage 513, USA
2019 | Teacher & Student Exhibition, Frame Shop/Artworks Cincinnati, USA

RESIDENCIES
2021 | The ArtWorks V2 Gallery: Student Power, Cincinnati, OH, USA
2021 | The ArtWorks V2 Gallery: The Way We See Ourselves, Cincinnati, OH, USA

Related Activities

´aceNITE

Cohabiting Memories
Artists in Dialogue

23.03.22

On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, we hosted Cohabiting Memories, our first ´aceNITE of the year and the first since the pandemic began. During this meeting, we had several simultaneous activities that complemented and strengthened each other. On the one hand, the Sala Políglota received the international project The World IS/IN a Handkerchief, a traveling exhibition curated by Claudia DeMonte and Cecilia Mandrile that traces chance encounters, moments of discovery and personal connections in distant places or unexpected contexts, being even At the time, a total of 121 works printed in different graphic techniques on cotton handkerchiefs—on this occasion, the genealogy of Proyecto´ace was also presented, curated by Alicia Candiani.

To this, the presentations of our artists-in-residency were added. Chris Knollmeyer (USA) presented and performed live for the audience a piece of music specially composed and designed to accompany the installation of the handkerchiefs in the Políglota Room. For 4 weeks, Chris composed original fragments with a generative software created by him, using sounds of musical instruments and ambient recordings taken from the City of Buenos Aires and his surroundings during his stay. In addition, Ioulia Akhmadeeva (Russia-Mexico) showed part of the results obtained during her Production Residency in our workshop, sharing with the public an artist’s book and different editions in which she was working on the themes of memory and the war situation. in which his native country is located under the title Stop War / Net Voyne!. Wesley Ericson (USA) opened for the public his site-specific installation Something familiar in our courtyard, where he made a wall painting that takes one of our hanging plants and incorporates it into a classic motif from art history: the figure of Perseus holding the decapitated head of Medusa. In addition, Wesley installed a mirror so that those who dared to contemplate his work would not be paralyzed by the gaze of Medusa.

Also, we share with the public the results obtained by the cohort of COHABITAR FRONTERAS, the seventh edition of our online program Together Apart. On this occasion, with the support of the Metropolitan Fund for the Arts, 20 fellows worked collectively to discover possible ways of jointly inhabiting indeterminate spaces within their artistic practices, creating new bodies of work and thinking about questions about the intersection of disciplines both within the art as outside of it.

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