Erik Hougen
Erik Hougen was born in Bismark, ND. He received his BFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead, and his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2008. From 2011-2022 Erik was the Artistic Director and Master Printer at the Lower East Side Printshop. He has participated in group and solo shows throughout New York and the US.
See examples of his full portfolio at http://www.erikhougen.com/
Hougen’s prints, paintings and films are filled with cinematic scenes from the American landscape - empty freeways that run straight into a never-ending horizons, telephone pole wires that are infinitely connected, and abandon structures that become visible in the middle of nowhere surrounded only by snow or darkness. Hougen culls his source material from a combination of found and personal photographs. This includes snapshots of cross country trips and family outings, as well as banal moments that reveal a quiet isolation that reads as both profoundly individual, and part of a larger shared understanding. By blending traditional printmaking techniques with painting, Hougen purposefully disrupts the pictorial plane of his canvases creating a dislocation that denies full access to the image and blurs the lines between perception and reality. This disruption sets up a tension in Hougen’s work between what we see and what we think we perceive.
