Eric Magnuson

Background

About Eric Magnuson

I have been thinking about and generating art work for well over twenty-five years, and consider myself to be a conceptual or an idea-based artist (non-medium specific), working principally within the framework of semiotics. From this context, traditional artistic disciplines are employed as each particular proposition directs me. The work generally takes shape within a project basis, and the subject, genre, and duration are methodically determined by designed theoretical parameters and/or played out with intuitive whim. Looking back, one project dovetails or intersects with the next creating an ideational daisy chain."Magnuson has described his work as semiotic investigations which examine the conceptual and representational shifts between the identity of words and the reality of things." Within my practice and study and with some regularity, I have discovered and observed a curious pattern of seemingly arbitrary relations in how meaning is culturally assigned. I have come to the conclusion that no reference is clean direct, no meaning is absolute, and no reporting entirely objective. It may not be sufficient to simply understand the meaning of things; we may have to discern what things do not mean as well.