Jon Eriksen - Artist info

Jon Eriksen (b.1976) is a visual artist and noise musician. Jon Eriksen has worked mainly with video for the past several years. His main focus has been on extreme cultures and his silent video installations have been dominated by collisions, noise theory, and overdrive aestethics. 

His recent video works and installations deal with the subcultures and dialectics of extreme music and film. His video works are made from found material; he utilizes short snippets from television and feature films and works with them in loops and cut-up sequences.

Eriksen's latest works, Deliverance (2008), Curtains (2008) and Transfixed (drone for a blackout) (2007), stem from an interest in the depiction of violence in film and literature. All three works deal with a fluidity of sentiment, voyeurism, and the urge to view death and horror up close.

The artist’s book Deliverance is the newest addition to a series of works in which Eriksen works with subtle undercurrents in horror literature and film. The book consists of more than three hundred distilled descriptions of violent scenes from horror films. The book is a methodical and reductive project that exposes some of the most fundamental parameters in violent film; in the texts all individual characters and motivations have been abandoned. What remains are only the physical acts of violence, detached climaxes.

The selection of scenes and the dry tone of the book highlight some of the inherent themes and the basic problematics of these films. The work talks about the motivations, compulsions and transformative potential of violent aesthetics. The result is simultaneously poetic and appalling.

The title is a direct reference to the seminal feature film by the same name. The film shares many points of interest with with Eriksen’s artwork; the film is characterized by its brutal and explicit violence and by an archetypical construction and theatrical, epic grandeur - themes Eriksen explores in this book and in other recent work.

Eriksens’ book, as his earlier production, is also in all its intensity tinted by a fascination for the fragile beauty of breakdown and collapse.

Transfixed (drone for a blackout) consists of a manipulated scene from the 1990 film Night of the Living Dead. A figure is frozen in a two-frame loop while fire licks at his head and arm. The scene becomes a time capsule of sorts, where the burning figure is in a state of continuous decay and rebirth.

Curtains is a modular work, based on cut-up and rearranged descriptions of violence in horror literature.

Eriksen's work has been shown in galleries and at festivals in Norway, Sweden, and the UK.

As a noise artist and musician Eriksen has since 1999 been playing improvised sets at venues and galleries in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and USA. His music connects as much to harsh noise traditions as to extreme forms of electronica and electroacoustic music. His music has been released on labels in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the UK.