Dustin Ericksen
CCMC

Bringing together painting, sculpture, sound and live performance, CONSISTENCY CONSISTENCY MMMMMMMM CONSISTENCY offers a vibrant insight into Dustin Ericksen’s multi-disciplinary practice, built around the formal elements of the Hindustani tintal rhythm. Inspired by the circuit board of a rare 1980s Indian drum machine that blur the edges between image and frame, a deft and textured 16-piece suite of paintings forms the centrepiece of the work, revealing Ericksen’s fascination with patterns, fractals, repetition and mutation. Accompanied by sculptural elements and a two-part live performance – for banjo and modular electronics – CCMC is a live and fluid testament to Ericksen’s practice which flirts with intentional amateurism, sonic dissonance and a fascination for the counterculture freak zone he calls home.

Dustin Ericksen sits at his desk in a small basement studio in North London, wearing a short-peaked cap and clear-rimmed plastic specs. A modular synthesiser twinkles to his left. A banjo is propped up to his right. Beside him are two books, An Introduction to Linear Algebra and The Evolution of Raga and Tala in Indian Music. He is reading both. “I always like to be learning something,” he says, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. Around him, the room is stacked with CDs (Joni Mitchell, Talk Talk, Tony Conrad, Fela Kuti, Cornelius Cardew) and yet more books (Werner Herzog, Val Wilmer, Robert Crumb) – the collections and inspirations of a life in the freak zone between art and music, professionalism and amateurism, meaning and void.

As an artist, Ericksen’s practice is perhaps best described by the German word vielfältig – diverse, wide-ranging, multifarious. He works in sculpture, painting, found objects, video, installation, sound and public art, forms not to fall into categories but to translate between them, interested in a productive tension where “something behaves like one thing but appears as another.” The Ercol settee in his studio is reoriented here at Cedric Bardawil as both sculpture, painting and frame. He observes that it looks a little like a piano. Furniture becomes sculpture and sculpture becomes rhythm. “That’s the terrain I’m working in,” he says.

What is the terrain of CCMC? Like much of Ericksen’s work, it relies on a dense webbing of conceptual and formal elements. A two-part musical performance of banjo and electronics oscillates between raw emotion and architectural structure. Sixteen paintings are hung at a height of 150cm around the room, mirroring the 16-step rhythmic cycle of the music, which is based loosely on the Hindustani teental (four groups of four), fed through an Elektron Digitakt II digital sampler to evolve and proliferate rhizomatically. Each of the paintings is based on the PCB board of a Radel Taalmala drum machine developed in India in the 1980s, encoded in cultural information and integrated with a Red Cedar frame, whose visible, organic grain has some analogue with the digital circuitry of the board. Dig a little and there are meanings, references, patterns and fractals throughout the installation, some explicit, others encoded into the materials. Sets of four are everywhere, in the quadraphonic speaker set-up and the square layout of the exhibition title. “And if you notice,” Dustin says, “there are eight ‘M’s with a total of 16 ‘legs.’”

Such an intense focus on formalism paints a one-sided picture of an artist whose practice has not been led in the pursuit of order, control and mastery, but of an insatiable, almost self-destructive curiosity.

Born in 1970, Ericksen spent the first years of his life in a house on stilts in a swamp at the end of a dirt road at the far end of Staten Island, closer to the ocean than the city. No wonder he was drawn to the banjo. Aged 8, he became obsessed with Steve Martin – the white-suited comedian, actor and musician whose 1974 appearance on The Midnight Special began with the words “it’s impossible to sing a depressing song while you’re playing the banjo,” and ended with a performance of such pathos the audience laughter burns to silence in an instant.

And so Ericksen took banjo lessons from a charlatan named Kurt in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, learned a wholly idiosyncratic form of bluegrass and developed a life-long relationship with an instrument whose history, derived from African gourd instruments like the kora, traces the unhappy American tale of slavery, minstrelsy, European classicism and Appalachian white poverty.

An intuitive mathematician, Ericksen was sent to university in his early teens, only to flunk out because he almost never went to classes. Instead, in high school, Ericksen made a buck on the side as a signwriter with a guy named Phil Yellin, who had painted signs for moving armies around the front in the Second World War. Piled into Yellin’s 1978 estate, five ladders strapped to the roof, poisonous chemicals in the boot, Ericksen saw a slice of deep Americana that would send him west to Kentucky, Wyoming, and ultimately California.

With an undergraduate degree in political economy, Ericksen fell headfirst into an art world milieu that included Mike Kelly, John Baldessari, Mayo Thompson of Red Krayola, Larry Johnson and his teacher John Knight. Conceptual art blew open the doors. Theory and practice marched through. Ericksen lapped it up, felt the thrill of the new, played music, made art and held down a job as a grants administrator for infrared astronomy at CalTech. As if this was the most natural thing in the world.

There, he turned down a job at a quantum lab called LIGO that went on to win the Nobel Prize because, irony of ironies, he wanted to be an artist. Call it integrity or stubbornness, he laughs about it now. By the early 2000s, Ericksen had moved to London, starting from scratch, rehearsing at Café Oto with his new band Squares & Triangles, learning about Anthony Braxton and trying to hold it together in a city built for career professionals. It is here we find him, twenty years on, in his basement studio, on the cusp of a solo exhibition, trying to make sense of it all.

“The idea of amateurism as I’m defining it is to be someone who is learning and always open to new avenues of creative output,” Ericksen explains. “I’ve always come at music from an ever-amateur position.” There is a hint of shoshin in his approach, the Zen Buddhist idea of Beginner’s Mind, popularized outside Japan by Shunryū Suzuki. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” Suzuki writes, “but in the expert’s mind there are few.” There is a productive freshness, a naivety even to this approach which Ericksen has applied both to his playing of the banjo and his intention to learn about modular electronics. As instruments, both share a temperamental quality, a tendency to slip out of tune, to bring its material qualities to bear on the quality of the sound.

“The banjo has a permanent dissonance, which is a physical condition, because the middle G is always out of tune,” he explains. “It’s a drone but there’s a dissonance in the drone. It’s always pulling one way or the other.”

Similarly, there is a wavering, fallible quality to Ericksen’s work. A quiet fatalism perhaps, somewhere between idealism and pessimism, hamstrung by his interest in difficult subjects, a practice that almost by design negates its own success. He comes across as a conceptual troubadour, always on the move, searching for the patterns that lurk beneath the surface. It’s an approach that is fiendishly difficult to pin down.

The sixteen paintings presented as part of CCMC inhabit this dissonance – a drum machine circuit board that pulls between acoustic tabla and electronic synthesis. “I was struck by how that circuit board holds cultural information – rhythmic systems, embedded values, latent content – in the same way a sandbox might hold the layered remains of old toys,” Ericksen explains. “There’s something archaeological in that comparison: you dig, and you find things that still carry meaning, still resonate.” The original drum machine contained 11 rhythms or talas, each with their own cultural roots. He looks at their patterns and sees something of Guernica in their Picassoid forms, a sort of inexplicable cultural resonance, accentuated by deft painterly interventions, adding layers of abstraction to an already densely matted surface.

What are we really looking at? By drawing out the ley lines of the plane wood boards on which he paints, the boundaries between image and frame are blurred. “The edge is not a boundary – it’s another field of action,” he elaborates, somehow placing the art within the life beyond, unstable, appearing unfinished, almost random. And yet, there are sixteen paintings, four groups of four, punctuated by an outbreath, highly organised, highly consequent.

If the question of how the image moves within (or without) the frame animates his painted works, the musical component of CCMC does something similar with space. A quadraphonic speaker array, one in each corner of the room, creates an environment for antiphony, harking back loosely to his spatialised performance works WASTED at the Averard, and JUDGEMENT at Thomas Dane, from 2017 and 2018, which were subsequently released on vinyl in 2022. Now Ericksen is thinking of the St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, and a call-and-response arrangement in which sound moves through architectural space, blurring with its boundaries, living both within and without the frame.

Ask him to open up even further, and Ericksen will tease out references to Chuck Mangione’s 1977 smooth jazz instrumental Feels So Good, on which his musical performance riffs. He will connect it to Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering the CEO of UnitedHealthCare in December 2024, and the ancient Greek notion of ‘kairos’, of taking decisive action at an opportune moment. He will pack the objects, sounds and images of CCMC so densely with meanings, patterns, connections and fractals that the circuitry of Ericksen’s hyper-curious mind begins to reveal itself too. Signwriter, banjo player, polymath. “I like the fact that I’m definitely a freak in the freak zone,” he says, smiling.

Objects contain cultures and histories, rational links and absurd coincidences, just as lives are accumulations of experience that are both linear and highly randomised. There are explanations, and there simply aren’t. After hours in the studio the patterns he speaks of are there to grasp and yet somehow constantly evade real understanding. Maybe for all the words the works must speak for themselves, their meaning not designed into, but emerging from the constellation of images, sounds and objects he has assembled. A few days later, Ericksen sends a follow-up email to clarify.

“That’s where it’s at for now. LMK any questions.”

Exhibition catalogue essay by Anton Spice