Artist Talk with Erik Mace

Join us at The Bascom as we welcome Erik Mace, 2024 Photography Resident for an artist talk.

About the Artist

Erik Mace is a visual artist who uses photography, graphic design, and book arts as his tools of inquiry. As an experimental visual thinker, he is deeply curious about the power of photography and adjacent mediums and how to take advantage of their limitations. Erik’s work is connected by a sense of restlessness where he seeks out messy processes, delighting in how visual and language-based tools can be expressly matched to subject matter, causing a body of work to rise from the chaos. 

Many of his projects germinate from specific personal memories and grow into deeper discussions of place and identity, while other bodies of work are born from a general sense of wonder. Preferring intense focus within each project to a singular visual vocabulary across his practice, Erik is most curious about how to take risks with his subject matter, material, and expectations of mediums.

Erik received his BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University in St. Louis and is an alumnus of the Contemporary Photography program at the ICP in New York. He currently holds a leadership position with the Kinship Photography Collective, leading workshops on photography, sequencing, and bookmaking. In 2023, he launched Ramble Editions with Kristen Welles Bartley, as a collaborative vision for photobook publishing. In 2024, Erik was named the Photography Artist in Residence at The Bascom in Highlands, NC.