The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present Oasis: Apparition in Blue, an interactive installation in our sculpture garden by Erik Peterson, curated by Laura Husar Garcia. Please join us for an Artist Walk and Talk on Saturday, October 11th at 6pm. The exhibition will be on view Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1-5pm through October 18, 2025.
Sunset Oasis: An Artist Walk and Talk with Erik L. Peterson and Laura Husar Garcia:
Saturday, October 11, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Wear comfy shoes, bring your sunglasses, and a headlamp or flashlight, if you have one, we’re going on an art and perception adventure! Connecting sculptural principles with the Sun and our spiraling planet, this artist talk will take us to new places (literally). We’ll begin at the Riverside Arts Center’s Sculpture Garden, then walk (or roll) to the DesPlaines river bend and green suspension bridge for sunset, and head back to RAC for a dark-sky viewing of Oasis and light refreshments.
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Oasis invites viewers into an active encounter with perception, public space, and the open-ended meaning of familiar civic forms. At first glance, it appears to be a monumental blue road sign—familiar, directive, municipal. But step closer, and the light transforms the object’s purpose. Light refracts and halos emerge. The sign shimmers like a mirage, destabilizing its own authority and reshaping the viewer’s relationship to the everyday in a playful way.
Through scale, interactivity, and visual distortion Erik L. Peterson reframes a utilitarian artifact into an object of wonder, reflection, and civic interruption. Oasis engages the language of infrastructure and turns it inside out, offering a temporary rupture in the logic of the urban landscape. It is both sculpture and social mirror—a poetic disruption that asks us to slow down, look again, and consider the subtle contradictions embedded in our built environments.
In the lineage of artists who reconfigure the ordinary to illuminate the uncanny, this work reveals the latent theatricality of civic life. Here, signage becomes stagecraft, and the public becomes performer. Oasis resists easy interpretation. It points nowhere—and everywhere—reminding us that meaning, like light, often arrives obliquely.
– Laura Husar Garcia, curator
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Erik L. Peterson is a public artist, nature playground designer-builder, and educator living and working in Chicago. He is best known for his large-scale urban interventions and neon installations (The Oasis, Inner State, and Seep), reclaimed wood public benches and nature playgrounds (Ashland, Two Sanctuaries, and the Nature Park at We Grow Chicago), signature edible ice cream sculptures (CreamCycle and Soft Palate), and public performances camouflaged within urban spaces (Checks & Balances, Two Tow’n, and Square Dance). His work subtly redefines viewers’ relationships to their own vision and the spaces they inhabit, making the mundane magical and utilizing scale and surprise to re-work how we interact with each other and with the physical things in our world. His large-scale sculptures and performances encourage people to become active participants in the creation of their own public and civic spaces and suffuse public spaces with wry wit and radical hospitality. Additionally, Peterson is a founder of Hyde Park Kunstverein, a community museum that operated out of SHoP in 2010-12 and Qeej Hero, a cross-cultural video game starring a Hmong wind instrument called the qeej.
Peterson has a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago. Peterson was lucky enough to spend time at ACRE during its first summer in operation. Subsequently, he was a Bolt Resident in 2012 and later an Artist Mentor alongside Hương Ngô for the Field/Work program at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition. Peterson now serves on CAC’s Board of Directors. Recent shows include Waterways at the Schingoethe Center at Aurora University and an installation of his new piece Two Sanctuaries on the Wild Mile, a floating eco park on the Chicago River. Peterson is currently working on two large-scale public art commissions–Pop Art (Bubble) and Golden Truth–for an arts corridor on Lawrence Avenue in Uptown. Peterson is spending the summer working with two groups of teens, one building out a community garden in Bronzeville and the other creating a large-scale ascending cedar spiral for the backyard of 6018 NORTH.
http://www.eriklpeterson.com
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https://www.riversideartscenter.com/freearksculpturegarden/202509/erik/peterson
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