Erik Laffer, American (1982 - )

Born in Smithtown, New York, in 1982, the seventh of eight children. At the age of three, his family moved to a small town in upstate New York, where he lived until he was 14. Then his family moved again, to Delmar, a suburb of Albany, New York. He has been moving ever since.

"Given my nomadic background, it’s almost natural that I’ve come to express myself—rather look to shape my identity and better understand myself—in maps. While my early landscapes and figurative works were influenced by the rural environment I grew up in, as well as the feelings of isolation I felt as a child with a learning disability, the representational abstracts that make up my current Cartography Series are not so much a study of emotion, as my earliest works were, but more of a logical and experimental exploration of where I’ve been, where I am now, and where I hope to be tomorrow."