My work is art and the things around art.

"You keep referring to yourself as a painter. But I’ve never thought of you as a painter. More as someone who injects painting issues into situations."

I am interested in ideas that are either really stupid or really smart.

I want to make work that I can experience as a viewer.

Viewership: the ways art (as maybe a unique form cultural entertainment) is received, consumed and transmitted.

Art is a visual language made up of idioms, I cannot embody them, I can only stand outside of them and look in. I can use them as material.

Materials: physical objects, words, art history, actions, music, interaction, all of which I manipulate, this is the most generalized way of framing how my art work gets made.

Contingency as structure: Using whatever is around as one starting point. Given these materials, what is of use, what is not and how can they be deployed?

The Aesthetics of Compression: The visceral, visual sensation of objects placed in such a manner as to form a fierce tension as they simultaneously resist and force themselves upon one another. Things stacked, leaned, shoved, balanced, fastened and arranged. This can also occur between concepts one holds in one’s mind.

The approach of focusing on the conversation and interaction, eventually objects get produced, stuff gets made out of necessity or inevitability. These are not props for the conversation, it is crucial that these are actual works of art.

There is nothing to be gained in the accumulation of multiple iterations of a theme in it of itself; unless the notion of "making more" somehow addresses or stems from the concept of the project.

The idea of the artist being someone who recognizes things out in the world and materializes them as art.

Erik Wenzel, June 7, 2009