Erin Shirreff
02 Sep - 06 Nov 2016
ERIN SHIRREFF
Halves and Wholes
2 September – 6 November 2016
Erin Shirreff is not a photographer, she would tell you, even if the photographic image lies at the center of her practice. Known primarily for her photo- and video-based work, Shirreff is part of a generation of young artists whose reflections on photography have revitalized the medium, but who refuse act as photographers in the classical sense. And whereas in her work it often appears that art historical references abound (for instance to Donald Judd and Tony Smith, in two pieces in her Kunsthalle Basel exhibition, or to Medardo Rosso and others in previous works), her resultant still and moving images are rarely actually “about” such seeming references. Instead they mine the vexed questions of how images mean and matter to us, and how we negotiate the distance between an object and its photographic representation, or between a photographic representation and our memory of the things it represents. Her exhibition Halves and Wholes at Kunsthalle Basel is the Canadian artist’s first solo show in a European institution.
Halves and Wholes
2 September – 6 November 2016
Erin Shirreff is not a photographer, she would tell you, even if the photographic image lies at the center of her practice. Known primarily for her photo- and video-based work, Shirreff is part of a generation of young artists whose reflections on photography have revitalized the medium, but who refuse act as photographers in the classical sense. And whereas in her work it often appears that art historical references abound (for instance to Donald Judd and Tony Smith, in two pieces in her Kunsthalle Basel exhibition, or to Medardo Rosso and others in previous works), her resultant still and moving images are rarely actually “about” such seeming references. Instead they mine the vexed questions of how images mean and matter to us, and how we negotiate the distance between an object and its photographic representation, or between a photographic representation and our memory of the things it represents. Her exhibition Halves and Wholes at Kunsthalle Basel is the Canadian artist’s first solo show in a European institution.