Erik Boker
Product Dissections
My work often deals with the many idiosyncrasies, inherent flaws, pasteurized realities, delirious conventions, bubbly paradoxes, and ambiguous excreta that may spill out of the current world culture and its consumerist ethos. With beauty and surprise, I try to make the familiar strange, and the strange – comprehensible.
I frequently enjoy working in the brackish waters somewhere between anthropology, ethnography, and art, as well as within the authority and authenticity of the museum. I am drawn to sociological and visual curiosities, artifact, artificiality, and document, and to the role we place nature in our lives and environments.
This project is an ongoing exploration of the roles of art, science, taxonomy, the consumer, the museum and institution, product and marketing, and our relationships with seemingly insignificant objects and materials that affect us on a daily basis. It approaches issues of anatomy and archaeology, while offering a revealed view within the plastic skins of what we consume – a delicate tension between death, health, and hygiene, collided with the extremities of marketing and the bold, impractical, and feverishly calculated colors and titles that reflect the culture of need and how extreme our teeth cleaning can be, and, when exposed, they even recall (a more aromatic) expressionist painting. I am interested in the notions of art as a commercial product and art as an artifact, and I continue to explore our understanding of their roles, and the inherent beauty, humor, and horror that lies within them.
