Artist Statement
My paintings explore the boundaries between the individual and environment, the porous edges between internal and external states. I paint the entirety of a visual or mental energetic field as I perceive it, without separation of form from space. Through vibrant palettes and dynamic, intuitive brushstrokes, I create immersive visual fields that resist fixed interpretation, evoking the infinite recomposition of the individual through the presence and rupture of form. I paint the experience of being drawn in towards something from afar, the magnetic pull to come closer. Moving towards the painting unveils continuous detail and surprises with new patterns, catching the viewer in a loop of visual fascination. Up close, individual marks may seem dissonant; yet in aggregate, they resolve into a resonant whole, echoing the layered and relational nature of human individuality itself.
My paintings are a deliberate reaction to the rise of AI systems that shape so much of contemporary culture. Trained on vast datasets, these AI systems reflect society’s categorical frameworks of what has been seen, named with definitions and boundaries, and archived in binaries. My work seeks to operate outside those systems, models, and predetermined datasets, to reject those frameworks. In my paintings, what AI might define as “object” ceases to hold true. There are no edges to parse, no boundaries to categorize, no binary by which to assign a 1 or 0. Instead, I aim to create a visual system rooted in human instinct, immediacy, and the childlike impulse to create without reference to an accumulation of information and data. My painting challenges the technological status quo and reasserts the primacy of human intuition, sensory experience, and the multiplicity of possible ways of being.
Bio
Erica Lorrie is a contemporary painter based in Baltimore, Maryland, whose artistic practice is a direct culmination of her two decades of experience bridging art and science. She earned her BFA in Painting, cum laude, from Boston University, and an MA in Medical and Biological Illustration with honors from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Lorrie spent over a decade working as a digital technologist and technical advisor in international development. Her expertise in artificial intelligence culminated in her role as a senior AI strategist, where she became a certified practitioner, award-winning innovator, and widely published author with six peer-reviewed articles and more than twenty international presentations. During this period, she explored photography and animation, earning recognition including the 2018 Blue Ribbon Film Festival Award (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Clinical and Scientific Conference), the 2019 Wellcome Photography Prize for Medicine in Focus, and the 2025 Technology Innovation Award from Abt Global.
Lorrie has now chosen painting as her medium for a conceptual reaction to the rise of the AI-driven systems she once helped create. Her work challenges the categorical, data-driven logic of algorithmic vision, instead building visual fields rooted in instinct, energy, and immediacy. Her recent paintings have been in various exhibitions and are held in private collections.