Erik Hougen: Twenty Miles in Eight Hours

Twenty Miles in Eight Hours was Sugarlift's first solo exhibition: around a dozen new screenprints, photographs and watercolors by Erik Hougen, a Brooklyn artist and master printer at the Lower East Side Printshop, where his work first caught the eye of Sugarlift co-founder Wright Harvey.

Every image, even in the works that are not photographs, begins with a real photograph: of Hougen's home in New York, of the North Dakota places he knew as a child, of travels across the United States. He then lets the picture drift just out of focus, so each scene seems to be dissolving, like a memory that never quite comes into the light. "Looking at a Hougen piece, you feel a personal connection to it in a way that is not entirely clear at first, as if you have a memory of having been there yourself, but cannot recall exactly when," said Harvey.

The six silkscreens carry titles that read like times of day, from 2:16:16 to 10:40:34, and two digital pigment prints, Otter Tail (1) and Otter Tail (2), were released as Sugarlift Editions. The show opened with a reception at 200 Morgan Avenue on February 18, 2015, and ran through March 31.