ERIK LYON

The DANGER of DISAPPEARING
Erik Lyon
http://www.eriklyon.com

Show Opens March 7, 2008 8 pm. Running until March 31, 2008.

The title of this show is in dedication to an old friend of mine from high school named Travis. Travis once told me that he spent most of his time wishing he didn´t exist. Travis was creative and outrageous, and he always wore the same clothes. In tenth grade he was my hero, together we partied hard and broke laws. He never did his homework, didn´t listen to his parents, and often didn´t show up for class. He also didn´t graduate, because by senior year he was completely strung out on crack, and nobody knew where he was half the time. Travis often did things that were extremely dangerous, sometimes for attention, and sometimes just because. I moved away after high school, and I never saw Travis again. Ironically, I don´t even have a picture of him, and I never did any drawings of him while he was around, so for me, he really did disappear. I liked Travis´ face, and sometimes I´d like to look at it. The real injustice of life is that there just isn´t enough time to draw all the things you´d like to draw. I face this predicament often, sometimes everything around me seems like its in imminent danger of disappearing, it all needs to be drawn, painted, photographed and documented, in case I´d like to look at it again sometime. The selection of work in this exhibition represents the various approaches used recently to record some of the things I wanted to remember. It has never been my intention, however, to document things faithfully. The most important part of my work has always been to just keep the pencil moving as much as possible.
The work in this exhibition takes the form of several separate series of drawings and projects, which led into one another, and were worked on simultaneously. The first series of drawings were originally presented in partial form in the self published comic called "This is the story about how everything got ruined". The drawings look like they follow some sort of narrative, but in actuality they don´t. Much of the content is imaginary, and none of the compositions were planned, a process of working which led directly to the second series, a continuous comic, which is written and drawn page by page. Again there is no actual narrative, only fragments of dialogue and imagery. Apart from these series, there is also an ongoing body of portraits and other drawings all of friends and family from around the world.