Erik's interest in the arts was borne out of an upbringing in a family of creative people—a father and 2 aunts who attended Black Mountain College and exposed him to the visual arts and fired his imagination with stories of studying with Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers, Ruth Asawa and Merce Cunningham. He grew up in Seattle and the San Juan Islands but moved to the Bay Area to study at the California College of the Arts. There he found himself in the midst of a Bauhaus–inspired approach to arts education–studying design, photography and painting. This lack of barriers between the branches of the arts continues to inform his work.

His images are often focused on our perception of space within and around the built environment, and notions of entropy. Although the imagery is largely devoid of a human presence, there are human traces and marks upon and within the structures and objects he photographs. These marks are witness to the lives that have come into contact with these physical forms and spaces. One result of the photographic process is the isolation of a fragment out of the stream of time, and a photograph inherently has a relationship to entropy. For this reason I consider photography to be the ideal medium for exploring the evolving material world.