SFA art teacher creates artwork inspired by Forbes Magazine's top corporations
By: Ryan C. Perry
Issue date: 4/17/08 Section: News
It seems unlikely that a visual artist would pick up a copy of Forbes Magazine to gather inspiration for a project, but that is what Chad Erpelding has focused on for more than the last three years. Erpelding, an associate professor at SFA's School of Art, has completed nine works of a 10-piece series based on Forbes Magazine's Top 10 Largest Global Corporations.
The complex two-dimensional pieces combine company logos, portions of maps of cities where the companies are located, and several rectangular pieces of canvas stretched over panels representing the amount of business in certain areas and broken down by how the company divides the globe into regions.
According to Erpelding, each piece takes several days of research.
"My main interest with the research was trying to figure out how these corporations view the world, not necessarily the business they are doing," Erpelding said. "I definitely look at their business and business structure, but primarily I'm looking at where they are and how visible or present they are."
Each piece, which is four to five layers of screen prints or paint separated by layers of glue, takes several minutes to understand. Time spent studying each piece reveals more about the corporation and it global structure-almost overwhelming the viewer with detail, yet remaining aesthetically pleasing.
"If I work non-stop-like crazy-it takes six weeks to do one piece," Erpelding said with a soft-spoken, slightly Midwestern accent. "It's a really slow process."
The most immediately visible part of each piece is the city road map overlaying each panel. Most of Erpelding's works are inspired-at least somewhat-by his travels or by research of locations. After graduating from college in the summer of 1997, Erpelding and a friend bicycled across North America and relied heavily on maps,
"The maps became a real place for us," Erpelding said. "It was interesting how objects on the map became real objects."
The complex two-dimensional pieces combine company logos, portions of maps of cities where the companies are located, and several rectangular pieces of canvas stretched over panels representing the amount of business in certain areas and broken down by how the company divides the globe into regions.
According to Erpelding, each piece takes several days of research.
"My main interest with the research was trying to figure out how these corporations view the world, not necessarily the business they are doing," Erpelding said. "I definitely look at their business and business structure, but primarily I'm looking at where they are and how visible or present they are."
Each piece, which is four to five layers of screen prints or paint separated by layers of glue, takes several minutes to understand. Time spent studying each piece reveals more about the corporation and it global structure-almost overwhelming the viewer with detail, yet remaining aesthetically pleasing.
"If I work non-stop-like crazy-it takes six weeks to do one piece," Erpelding said with a soft-spoken, slightly Midwestern accent. "It's a really slow process."
The most immediately visible part of each piece is the city road map overlaying each panel. Most of Erpelding's works are inspired-at least somewhat-by his travels or by research of locations. After graduating from college in the summer of 1997, Erpelding and a friend bicycled across North America and relied heavily on maps,
"The maps became a real place for us," Erpelding said. "It was interesting how objects on the map became real objects."
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