By 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

We 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

The 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.

ICA - 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

Fionn 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. 

Five 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