Lisa Cooley is pleased to present a solo presentation of work by Erin Shirreff at Frame, a new section for young galleries at the Frieze Art Fair, which takes place in Regent’s Park, London, from October 15 through 19. The gallery will be at stand R13.
Erin Shirreff will present 8 large-scale photographs from a group of works called Knives. The images suggest documentation of archeological remains but the objects they present do not belong to traceable history or reveal details of their provenance. Rather, as hand-modeled sculpture presented in two dimensions, the work speaks of its own making and materiality.
The objects are made from wax-based non-drying clay so their surfaces appear skin-like and supple, contrasting with the hard-edged threat of the tools they vaguely echo. Centered, cross-lit, and presented greatly enlarged in black-and-white (the artist’s fingerprints are sometimes visible), they are factual renderings of fictional things.
The series relate to minimalist taxonomies (e.g., Bernd and Hilla Becher’s), Walker Evans’s portraits of tools, and in their formal composition, to Robert Mapplethorpe’s abstract and sexualized depictions of bodies and flowers. Shirreff’s photographs thus straddle, perhaps uneasily, the thin line between representation and abstraction: ambiguously defined objects are clearly itemized as their mottled surfaces are transformed into varying tones of light and dark.
Shirreff never exhibits the objects themselves. Their portraits are left to speak for them, but in their formality silences remain. The generalities are there—these are base, elementary shapes—but in the end they are hauntingly blank. This affect of blankness and what it sets in motion, something that recurs throughout Shirreff’s practice, serves to highlight the process that we each engage in when we create meaning day to day.
Erin has said, “[I started] to think in the most general terms about how we generate meaning […], how we anthropomorphize things or rely on familiar metaphors, about the simple circuitous mechanics of how we project meaning onto what’s around us as a way to understand it and ourselves. […] I’m curious about moments when something ordinary defies naming.”
Erin Shirreff lives and works in New York City. She was born in Kelowna, British Columbia and received her MFA from Yale University. Recent exhibitions include Some Thing Else, curated by Simone Subal, at Peter Blum, and Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, curated by Sima Familant at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, both in New York. Lisa Cooley will present her solo debut in October 2009 and in 2010, she will exhibit new work with Barbara Kasten and Anthony Pearson at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago.
For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 212-680-0564 or via email at frontdesk@lisa-cooley.com.