Erin Shirreff
Erin Shirreff lives and works in New York City. Recent exhibitions include White Cube, London; the Aspen Art Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; MoMA P.S.1, Sculpture Center; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; and White Flag Projects in St. Louis. Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Guggenheim Museum. Shirreff is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant.
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Greater New York 2010 Catalog
Klaus Biesenbach, Connie Butler, Neville Wakefield
Features Erin Shirreff.
The third iteration of the quintennial exhibition organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Museum of Modern Art, Greater New York 2010 showcases emerging artists who are living and working in the metropolitan New York area. Covering a full range of practices and media, and eagerly anticipated throughout the art community, the 2010 exhibition and catalogue present new works by more than 70 artists of diverse backgrounds, allowing each of them a significant area of space in P.S.1's expansive galleries in which to show new work or work that has been made in the past five years. This year, Greater New York is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, P.S.1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large; Connie Butler, MoMA Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawing; and Neville Wakefield, P.S.1 Senior Curatorial Advisor.
Hardcover: 236 pages
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, PS1
Language: English
ISBN - 10: 978-0-9841776-2-2
ISBN - 13: 978-0984177622 -
Knight's Move
Fionn Meade
Features Erin Shirreff.
This exhibition catalogue for the 2010 SculptureCenter presentation, 'Knight's Move,' brings together artists prominent to the dialog of New York's recent past as well as those at the very beginning of their careers. Curated by Fionn Meade, this survey of new sculpture in New York embodies an informed yet playful and questioning view of the contemporary. The catalogue features artist profiles and an essay by SculptureCenter Curator Fionn Meade.
To order, please contact the gallery.
Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: SculptureCenter
Language: English
ISBN - 10: 0-9703955-5-8
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The Anxiety of Photography
Matthew Thompson, Anne Ellegood, Jenelle Porter
Features: Erin Shirreff.
Group exhibition catalog
Artists include Colby Bird, Miriam Böhm, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Brendan Fowler, Leslie Hewitt, Matt Keegan, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Anthony Pearson, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Matt Saunders, David Benjamin Sherry, Erin Shirreff, Dirk Stewen, Sara VanDerBeek, and Mark Wyse.
Text by Matthew Thompson, associate curator at the Aspen Art Museum;
Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles;
and Jenelle Porter, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
Softcover: 408 pages
Publisher: Aspen Art Museum, Distributed by D.A.P.
Language: English
ISBN - 10: 978-0-9343224-51-9
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Erin Shirreff in group show at the Approach
January 08, 2012Erin Shirreff will be featured in a group show at The Approach from February 2 - March 11, 2012. The exhibition will include work by Michele Abeles, Robert Heinecken, Alexandra Leykauf, and Lisa Oppenheim, amongst others.
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Erin Shirreff at Carleton University Art Gallery, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Contemporary Art Gallery
January 04, 2012Erin Shirreff will present a touring solo exhibition titled, Available Light, which will travel to Carleton University Art Gallery, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Contemporary Art Gallery. The tour will run through 2013.
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Josh Faught and Erin Shirreff are the recipients of Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grants
December 31, 2011We are pleased to announce that Josh Faught and Erin Shirreff are the recipients of Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grants.
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Erin Shirreff at SCAD, Atlanta
November 17, 2011Curated by Fairfax Dorn, this exhibition features works by Rosy Keyser, Laleh Khorramian, Heather Rowe and Erin Shirreff originally commissioned by Ballroom Marfa for the Fall 2010 show "Immaterial." On view through January 20, 2012.
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Erin Shirreff commission for the Public Art Fund
November 15, 2011Erin Shirreff was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to create an outdoor sculpture as part of the exhibition, A Promise is a Cloud. The work will be on view at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn through September 14, 2012.
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Erin Shirreff in Group Show at White Cube
September 14, 2011Erin Shirreff will be included in the group show Structure & Absence at White Cube, London. The exhibition will open on October 11, 2011 and will be accompanied by a catalogue.
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Erin Shirreff in Group Show at Frith Street Gallery
July 11, 2011Erin Shirreff will be featured in an upcoming group show at the Frith Street Gallery in London. The show includes the work of Alex Dordoy, Rudolf Polanszky, Erin Shirreff, David Maljkovic, Helen Mirra, Neil Clements, Sara Barker, Rachel Adams, and will be on view from July 15th, 2011 until September 30th, 2011.
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Erin Shirreff at MCA Denver
June 16, 2011Erin Shirreff's work is included in a group show entitled Another Victory Over the Sun at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. The show will be open during June, 2011, and includes the work of Spencer Finch, Miguel Calderòn, Dan Flavin, Scott Johnson, Juan Muñoz, Melanie Smith, and David Zimmer.
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Erin Shirreff at Galeria Marta Cervera
May 16, 2011Erin Shirreff is included in a group show entitled Tabula Rasa at Galeria Marta Cervera in Madrid, Spain.
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Erin Shirreff at the Aspen Art Museum
May 13, 2011Erin Shirreff is included in a group exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum entitled The Anxiety of Photography. The show will be up from May 13th until July 17th, 2011.
The show also includes work by Colby Bird, Miriam Böhm, Liz Deschenes, Roe Ethridge, Brendan Fowler, Mario Garcia Torres, Leslie Hewitt, Matt Keegan, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, Anthony Pearson, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Matt Saunders, David Benjamin Sherry, Dirk Stewen, Sara VanDerBeek, and Mark Wyse. An illustrated catalogue will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition, featuring contributions by Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Jenelle Porter, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.
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Erin Shirreff at Grimm Gallery
May 10, 2011Erin Shirreff is featured in her first solo show at Grimm Gallery in Amsterdam. The show, entitled Two Buildings, will run from May 10th until May 24th, 2011.
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Erin Shirreff at Galerie Crevecoeur
March 16, 2011Erin Shirreff is included in a group show at Galerie Crevecoeur in Paris. The show, entitled The Promise, also includes the work of Agnieszka Polska, Shana Moulton, Susanne M. Winterling, David Malek, and Florian et Michaël Quistrebert. The exhibition will be up from March 16th until April 30th, 2011.
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Erin Shirreff at Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid
December 31, 1969Erin Shirreff will present a solo show at Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid. The exhibition will be on view from January 5 - February 25, 2012.
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Erin Shirreff in group show at Room East
December 31, 1969The exhibition will inaugurate Steve Pulimood's new gallery and will feature work by Ethan Breckenridge, David Brooks, Zipora Fried, Emily Henretta, Wyatt Kahn, Zak Kitnick, Erik Lindman, David Scanavino, Erin Shirreff, and Nick VanWoert. The exhibition will be on view from January 8 - March 11, 2012.
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Shirreff: Time Out New York
December 15, 2009By exploiting the difference between what the eyes see and what the camera sees, and by playing two dimensions against three, Erin Shirreff coaxes animated life from still photographs, sculptures from shadows, and an air of purpose from equivocal objects. Her New York solo debut (titled after the things that people most often say they make out in ink blots or clouds) is a smart, coherent show that examines the role projection plays in our reading of the world.
Two videos of a moonlike sphere lit from the side play on side-by-side monitors, conjuring a sense of celestial remoteness and mystery. Black-and-white photographs, reminiscent of both James Welling’s velvet-and–pastry-dough landscapes and Richard Barnes’s documentary pictures, feature forms that could be fossils, primitive tools, or potsherds but are actually tiny pieces of worked clay. Planar sculptures made of ash and plaster, inspired by the work of Tony Smith, have a visual heft disproportionate to their insubstantiality. A color picture of the Roden Crater in Arizona, rephotographed hundreds of times, is transformed into a stop-action film. Changes in the lighting of each shot—as well as blooms of red and flares of white from the camera’s flash—create what pass for spectacular atmospheric effects and, with them, the illusion of reality, if not of depth.
Shirreff’s art can at times be dry and difficult to access, and her most engaging works are still her videos. Conceptually, however, this show couldn’t be more timely. As our world becomes ever more absorbed by images, her efforts remind us how urgent it is to understand what’s real.—Anne Doran
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Shirreff: Frieze
January 2010We are dealing with replicas, but of what? For her first solo show ‘Landscapes, Heads, Drapery and Devils’ at Lisa Cooley Fine Art, Erin Shirreff presented an arrangement of cryptic objects, films and photographs that appeared to be mundane, but stubbornly managed to defy recognition. The title of the show derived from the most common associations that people make when confronted with ambiguous forms – they are, perhaps, the most basic categories by which we generate meaning. In his unfinished essay ‘The Artist as Site-Seer’ (1966–7), Robert Smithson related the origin of the visual to language, or what he called the ‘enigma of blind order’, to reflect on the process of creating meaning through classification. A similar investigation can be found in Shirreff’s recent works, which employ the idiom of the all-too-familiar as a visual trap. They lure the viewer into familiar terrain by employing a visual language that mimics well-known things in the world, as well as the pseudo-scientific aesthetics established by Conceptual art. However, the familiar quickly becomes unfamiliar, and the viewer – unable to make sense of what he or she is seeing – has to rely on perception that is based less in recognition than in observation.
In Two Moons (2009), a moon-like sphere hovers in the middle of each of two adjacent monitors. Both spheres are lit from the side: while one slowly appears and disappears within the brightening and dimming lights, the other rotates on its own axis, gradually revealing its cratered surface. The changes are hardly detectable to the wandering eye, the slow pace turning the investigative gaze into a mesmerized stare. There is a similar effect in Roden Crater (2009), a single-channel video that was projected onto a large screen suspended in the back corner of the gallery. Shirreff took hundreds of photographs of a photograph of the dormant crater that houses James Turrell’s iconic, still-unfinished earthwork. She photographed the image repeatedly from the same distance and perspective, but under changing light conditions, then edited the pictures together to create a 15-minute film, mimicking a time-lapse shot of the actual terrain. The altering light environments create the impression of changing daylight and seasons while the flash reflection on the image’s surface is reminiscent of the travelling sunlight.
In Shirreff’s recent series ‘Untitled’ (2009), angular geometric forms made of compressed ash leant along the long gallery wall, their relatively thin surfaces suggesting veneer or casts rather than actual structural elements. With no immediately obvious function, these shells may evoke ancient temples as much as they might the papier-mâché architecture of Disneyland. It is difficult to find the right angle from which to examine their multiple surfaces, which encourage viewers to continually shift their body in relation to them; an erratic dance, examining them from all sides and angles. Shirreff’s work plays with the relationship between appearance and the actual object, collapsing the things that we think we see with the actuality of compressed ash, plaster casts and pictures of pictures. All the action occurs on the surface; it is where our knowledge and the objects’ inherent references meet. It is also where the artificial nature of the works is revealed. Once the sleight of hand is exposed, and the viewer realizes what he is actually looking at, the stand-in nature of the works becomes apparent. It is not about the reference to moons, craters or architecture but much more about the process of recognition, about how something may appear to be a landscape, a head, drapery or a devil.––Anna Gritz
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Shirreff: The New York Times "Between Here and There"
July 9, 2010 -
Shirreff: The New Yorker
December 7, 2009The young sculptor traffics in history's shadow and in sleight of hand. Two videos are convincing as Apollo-era shots of full moons, but they actually document a plaster model in the artist's studio. A row of black-and-white photographs suggest evidence of inscrutable relics (with a nod to Brassaï's "Sculptures Involuntaires"); the fragments, like the moon, are handmade. The pièce de résistance is slow-moving footage of James Turrell's "Roden Crater" (an earthwork in progress since 1980) made by rephotographing the same image hundreds of times, to counterfeit shifting climate and light. Forget if it sounds academic or derivative; just go and let the magic win out.
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Shirreff: Artforum "Between Here and There"
November 2010 -
Shirreff: Artforum.com
October 30, 2010ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Erin Shirreff has created a delicate balance between form and image for her exhibition “Still, Flat, and Far,” a literal title that is indicative of the structures she has arranged. Four sculptures made from compressed ash and Hydrocal, a white gypsum cement, lean against the walls and, in one case, jut up from the floor at an angle. The material composite gives these sculptures a sullen color and a surface that confirms fabrication. Adorning the walls, six photographs are presented in wooden frames like those in which butterfly collections might be displayed. These black-and-white newsprint images are fastened in place, one pin in each upper corner so the bottom edges curl, casting shadows. Such physical details typify the materiality imbued in Shirreff’s show. The images depict landscapes; the most potent captures two people squeezed on the extreme left of the photograph, the rest of the shot dominated by a monumental Tony Smith sculpture.
Through her photography and sculpture, Shirreff investigates the material nature of these media and calls attention to how we read them. The connective tissue is Moon, 2010, a video in which an image of the moon is illuminated from various angles, highlighting the extreme readings one might make of a still image placed in variable lighting contexts. The thingness of this particular work is further emphasized by the screen on which it is projected. Like the linear planes of the sculptures, the screen protrudes from the wall, creating a triangle with the far right edge at the greatest distance from the wall. Thus, the projected image, in which lighting is the key to transformation, is also physically transformed by a compelling golden glow at the edge of the screen.––Kathleen Madden
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Shirreff: The New Yorker "Knight's Move"
June 14, 2010Fionn Meade curated this ambitious, if usual-suspect-heavy survey of new tendencies in New York sculpture. The show lifts its title from a 1923 text by Victor Shklovsky, which asserts that the power of art lies in its capacity to communicate "things as they are perceived and not as they are known." The premise justifies Meade's inclusion of a fair amount of work that might be called "post-sculpture," either filmed or photographed (works by Alex Hubbard, Erin Shirreff, Sara VanDerBeek, and Tamar Halpern stand out). Objects that suggest an alternate reality––Ohad Meromi's platform as stage, Mika Tajima's storage rack as screening room––look especially strong. The neo-Constructivist, oddly architectonic, and provisional are in; figuration is not. One noteworthy exception: Tom Thayer's eccentric bale of turtles lurking in the basement.
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Shirreff: New York Magazine "The New York Five"
May 16, 2010Five Artists to Seek Out “Greater New York,” MoMA P.S. 1’s third quinquennial showcase of our city’s contemporary-art world, is every bit the hodgepodge it should be. Some 68 local artists and collectives working in every imaginable medium take over the museum come May 23, and many of them are sticking around to produce new work within the building itself. Here are five we’ll still be talking about by the time the 2015 iteration rolls around.
Erin Shirreff Media: Sculpture, photography, video. Lives/Works in: Greenpoint. What You’ll See: Bones, moon rocks, prehistoric tools—Shirreff evokes them all in the black-and-white photographs she takes of her own amorphous clay sculptures. It’s organic and otherworldly and beautiful work, inspired in part by time spent living in New Mexico. “In the desert you actually see geologic time,” Shirreff says. After her solo debut at Lisa Cooley last fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought a flickering video that renders the Roden Crater, James Turrell’s Arizona earthwork, into a Martian landscape.––Rachel Wolff
