Strand Gallery
March 3 – April 15, 2018
Opening Reception Saturday, March 3, 2018
6:00 – 9:00 PM
Artist talk at 6:30 PM
AnnieLaurie Erickson
Into the Digital Mesh
AnnieLaurie Erickson’s work investigates the physical apparatus of the Internet and digital surveillance. Into the Digital Mesh includes photographic works from her ongoing Data Shadows series, which examines the traces of information we leave behind as we traverse the digital sea of the Internet. Traveling to every Google Data Center in the United States and Europe, and visiting the largest data facilities of Apple and Facebook, Erickson documents the massive infrastructure that houses our data, juxtaposing their unremarkable exteriors with their brightly colored and tangled interiors. The project calls to attention to the physical scale of information collected by these institutions and considers its impact on our daily experience. Erickson’s work offers a symbolic gesture of “counterveillence,” illuminating the locations holding our data through photographs that peer back into to the global scale of technology that surveils our digital lives.
AnnieLaurie Erickson is a lens-based artist and educator residing in New Orleans, LA. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Erickson is currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of Photography at Tulane University, as well as a collective member at Antenna in the St. Claude Arts District in New Orleans. Erickson has exhibited her work at Higher Pictures, NYC; the Goethe-Institut, Washington, DC; the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA; Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, OR; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans; the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY; the Boston Center for the Arts; and CentrePasquArt, Bienne, Switzerland, among others. Notable press includes The New Yorker, The Huffington Post, Oxford American, Daily Serving, Feature Shoot, Lenscratch, Paper Magazine, Afterimage, and Foam Magazine. In 2016 Erickson received an ATLAS (Award to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) grant to develop her project Data Shadows.
