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."
Erpelding is currently exhibiting an installation in a San Antonio gallery titled "20 Miles," which is hundreds of strips of muslin resembling roads overlapping in a complex network. His work is most closely related to alternative "system" artists such as Mark Lombardi, Matthew Ritchie and Julie Mehretu. The artists combined extensive research with visually stunning and often disorientating pieces.
Erpelding picked a topic that interested him and began working while in graduate school in 2005 at Southern Illinois University. While in his last semester of school, he accepted a teaching position at SFA.
"I definitely wanted to learn more about (the corporations)," Erpelding said. "I am not interested if I feel like I am not learning something. My real interest was the looking at the idea of globalization-something that is really a hot-button issue."
Each piece has separate but connected panels representing different regions and how these corporations bring them together. There is always an underlying layer unifying the entire piece, such as a company logo.
"There are positives to globalization, such as how much diversity there is and how easy it is to travel," Erpelding said. "I can go to Houston and get really authentic Vietnamese food."
As with most things in life, with positives come negatives.
"With globalization, you also get a homogenization of cultures and other abuses-such as corporations avoiding environmental laws that are stricter here, or they go over to another country where there are different labor laws," Erpelding said. "There are positives and negatives, and I am interested in both."
Most of the critical details in Erpelding's work are thinly veiled with a few layers of glue, subduing colors and minimizing lines and words. This is fitting, because he gathered all of his corporate information through thinly veiled information on each company's website describing their worldview.
"There were lots of interesting things in the research, such as how dramatically different corporations categorized the areas of the world," Erpelding said. "G.E., for example, called North America the U.S. and Canada, and everything else was South America. They used continent words, but broke from it. If something is transparent and seems slightly offensive, it is surprising."
Throughout the project, Erpelding has created a body of work that not only attracts and guides the eye from piece to piece; it gives the viewer a broader sense of global connection.
"I do want people to think about the connections between places and how different entities make this happen," Erpelding said. "I may have a view of how places are connected, but it is interesting to see how giant corporations view places and connect them."
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