Conceptual Art Consultants

Eric has 11 years of professional experience in the visual and performing arts as well as in business and finance. While pursuing his BA in Media Theory and Criticism at California State University Northridge, he learned film production and photography and earned a minor in theater and appeared in several plays. Upon graduation, he began his career in the field of mortgage banking in order to support his artistic endeavors. He started working in a call center, but eventually became a business analyst and assistant vice president of a major international bank. During these years, Eric’s problem solving skills saved the bank millions of dollars.

After graduating from CSUN, Eric formed the SOB Theatre Company with a group of other alumni. Eric served as CFO of the company and produced the eight plays that the SOBs created over the course of three years, while also performing in six of them. During this time, he also formed The Jennifer Project, a band that performed throughout Los Angeles for eleven years and won a Rock City Music Award in 2006.

While working with the SOBs on an adaptation of playwright Charles Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica, a play inspired by the work and life of artist Robert Rauschenberg, Eric’s interest in contemporary art became more potent. Over the next few years, his photography and contemporary art practice grew more rigorous, and he decided to pursue his graduate studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where he earned an MFA in Photography & Media and Integrated Media in 2014. It was in the Integrated Media program, an innovative program designed to bring together artists from all disciplines (including fine art, theater, film, music and dance) that Eric met his Conceptual Art Consultants partner Allison M. Keating. Coincidentally, their first collaboration was another Charles Mee adaptation.

At CalArts, Eric’s art practice expanded from a strictly photographic process to include video and performance. His MFA thesis, “n of 1” explores psychological testing and issues surrounding the collection of psychological data. The project interrogates the ways in which the interpretation of data is used to re-present and pathologize personality. The thesis includes a video of Eric answering the 567 questions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test, as well as an interpretative performance of the report from a six-hour neuropsychological test that was administered to him in 2012.

Eric’s recent work has been exhibited at Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, as well as at CalState Long Beach. His earlier photographic work has been exhibited at the 11:11 Art Collective Gallery in Tarzana, CA, the Pierce College art gallery in Woodland Hills, and the Brooks Institute’s Gallery 27 in Santa Barbara.

Artist and former CalArts professor John Baldessari once remarked in an interview that art “can’t be taught. You can set up a situation where art might happen, but I think that’s the closest you get.” Eric believes that real artistic innovations happen when artists come together to collaborate, critique, and support each other’s practices. Eric believes that all creative people—from business teams looking for innovative ways to position their brands to conceptual artists looking to broaden their practice—can benefit from the collaborative, rigorous, and supportive approach of Conceptual Art Consultants.

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