Red Dress
My photographic composites are all in some way connected to the passage of time. I move through life, I remember, and I witness that all things are eventually reclaimed. My art gives shape to time, space, memory, and ultimately my life.
Photoshop allows me to manipulate images to create a tableau in a way that I could not achieve with traditional mediums. I do not plan out my images before the various components are photographed or scanned. Rather I collect, catalog and store content, for use later when I decide to make an image, much like a collage artist. My style of image making takes its inspiration from an early fascination with optical illusions and advent calendars. There are doors, windows and hallways that lead to mysterious places that don’t quite make sense.
Red Dress, a self-portrait series by Carol Erb, explores the idea of authentic existentialism. Choices made, sometimes blindly, at other times with deliberation, ultimately alone, the artist explores the life that she has crafted and her journey through it in a red dress, the color of life.
Bio
Carol Erb was born and bred in Kalamazoo, Michigan, into a family that actively supported the local art community. Museum trips and Saturday morning art classes were a priority. After two years of study in drawing, photography, printmaking and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist left to complete a BA degree at DePaul University. Carol worked as a financial analyst at an investment management firm in Chicago for 15 years.In 1999, a move with her husband to California prompted Carol to leave the corporate world and revisit art through drawing and painting classes at the Brentwood Art Center in Los Angeles. A Photoshop class in 2012 sparked a change in her approach to the making of art. She returned to her early interest in photography, but in a new untraditional way that incorporates her past experience, acquired skills, and desire to communicate visually with passion, expression, and an individual style that had been missing from her previous work.
Carol lives in Pacific Palisades, California with her husband.
