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Derek Erdman often displays on the walls of Bleeding Heart Bakery and Smash Cake Chicago, he is regularly called a Pop Artist, and this is understandable given that his tactics appear to intensify the preoccupations of the Factory tradition.

His energy is concentrated in the plan (selecting source materials from which he will ‘borrow’ imagery), and the execution of each piece becomes semi-automatic, a series of choreographed tasks that he can carry out much like an assembly liner or a tap dancer might perform his job.

The subjects of his paintings (second-tier celebrities, flash-in-the-pan current events, obsolete advertisements) are almost always borrowed from the moving spotlight of popular attention, and so the pieces themselves take on the form of commercial debris, relics of the recent surface-past.

Erdman perpetually offers his fans absolute artistic control of his fate (gleefully handing over his Myspace password, for instance, so that anybody might tinker with his brand). In doing so he illuminates his own celebrity, like all the others, as the people’s creation.

Visit the bakery or his website to see more!