Fulton County Public Art Program
Atlanta, GA
The Fulton County Public Art Program commissions, acquires and maintains art for County facilities as well as providing cultural enrichment programming.
MessageAREA C Projects is the portfolio for the public art installations and designs of Erik Carlson (lead artist) and Erica Carpenter, as well as miscellaneous other projects carried out under the name AREA C. Erik Carlson is an artist, composer and designer based in Providence, RI. He works in public art, interactive and new media installations, and recorded and reproducible mediums. Public art installations by AREA C projects can be seen at the San Diego International Airport, the Denver Public Library, the Dubai Mall, Bowling Green State University, Chapel Hill Public Library, and Nashville, TN. AREA C projects is currently completing new permanent installations in Denver, CO and Kingston, RI.
Starting from the assumption that community is real, elastic and present in all human settings, we work to bring its presence to light in ways that speak directly to the unique cultural space an artwork occupies. We've used this approach to visualize connections formed within rooted civic and academic cultures as well as ephemeral communities lasting only the time it takes to pass between airport terminals or stair landings. We often draw from archival resources and research into local history, environment and identity, using video, light, transparency and scale to reveal hidden points of correspondence.
We come to each project with an open agenda, actively meeting the local community and carefully considering the site’s physical requirements as our primary guides in choosing what media and aesthetic approach will best serve the artwork. To this end, we work in a wide variety of media to tailor each artwork to its particular environment so that it speaks to its audience in enduring ways.
Since 2002 Erik Carlson has been recording and performing under the name AREA C. His recordings have appeared on Preservation Records, Sedimental, Students of Decay and Last Visible Dog. He has composed soundtracks for several documentary films, including "Witness: Katrina," an Emmy Award-winning feature on the National Geographic Channel, and "Town Hall" (PBS America ReFramed Series). In 2009 he received the McColl-Johnson Fellowship in music composition. Erik holds a BA (with distinction) in English Literature / Modern Studies from the University of Virginia.
After earning a B.A. from Vassar College, Erica Carpenter went on to Brown University’s Graduate Program in Literary Arts/Poetry, where her work was recognized with awards and fellowships including the University’s Peter Kaplan Fellowship, a Beinecke Fellowship, and a Westin Prize for Poetry. She earned her M.F.A. in 1998. In 2000, Etherdome published her first chapbook, Summoned to the Fences, and in 2006 her first full-length collection of poems, Perspective Would Have Us, was brought out by Burning Deck Press. She has also published poems in journals including Lingo, 26, Sal Mimeo, and No: A Journal of the Arts.
Along with their ongoing public art collaborations as AREA C projects, Erica Carpenter and Erik Carlson have collaborated in numerous ways over the years. In 2000, they created BASE, a project that began as a documentary work for the Quonset / Davisville Naval Base, but developed into a photo and text-based art piece that approached the entire abandoned property as a found object. Over the years, continuing collaborations have included: Haunts (Creative Capital finalist, 2008) an installation piece for the “pre-abandoned” neighborhoods created by America’s speculative housing bubble; Found Ground (funded by RISCA, 2008), which used rough walls exposed by demolition in downtown Providence as screens for text/image projections; and as co-curators / artists for the multi-year CURIOUSER group installations + performances at Providence's Museum of Natural History (2010 - 2012).
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