Erin Shirreff
04 Jan - 10 Mar 2012
ERIN SHIRREFF
Standing Shadows
4 January - 10 March, 2012
Galeria Marta Cervera is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Erin Shirreff, Standing Shadows.
For the past few years Shirreff has explored how mediation affects our grasp of, and access to, experience. In her video, sculpture, and photography she creates open-ended encounters, often with singular forms, that at times evoke a sense of melancholy. They become meditations on our process of recognition, the anxiety and potential of indeterminacy, and the certainty of loss.
This exhibition, installed in the adjoining gallery spaces at General Castaños, 5, presents three discrete but related works that extend Shirreff's exploration of the ways we view and understand aesthetic objects, especially sculpture from the recent past which circulates primarily as image. Shirreff is interested in the physical sensation of a form that is seen only in reproduction—both the limitations created by the patina of 'historical image', and the potential embedded in what is largely an imaginary experience.
Monograph, 2011, is a set of six large-scale photographs documenting forms Shirreff has made in her Brooklyn studio that resemble minimalist or biomorphic mid-century sculpture. Isolated in an empty field, they are lit in a manner that accentuates their smooth surfaces and sharp geometry, but that also renders them materially strange and ambiguously scaled. Each photograph is folded in half and hinged open within the frame to echo the spread of a book. Further, four images are constructed of mismatched pairs, much like pre-press printer spreads. Taken together, the set becomes a complete, unbound 'signature' that spatially surrounds the viewer, inverting a conventional sculpture-viewer relationship.
In an adjacent gallery is Field, Shade, Leaf, Line, 2011, a five-minute looped slide dissolve program that features 160 images derived from reproductions in modern sculpture anthologies. Close-up, highly fragmented views of corners, footings, curves, surface reflections and flooring register in temporary alignment as the two projectors progress, to create new, if fleeting, abstract moments on the screen.
Untitled (Standing Shadows) (all 2011) is a collection of small-scale sculptures installed on a large pedestal in the gallery's central space. Made from pigmented gypsum, newspaper broadsheets, bent steel rods, and hand-cut sheets of painted aluminum, these provisional sculptures come together somewhat casually: forms lean against one another, stack, are held down or propped up. Shapes and fragments of shapes, forms and fragments of forms are echoed in each work, at times created by the sculptural components themselves, at others by the negative space they create. They appear both newly made and left behind, somehow caught on the margins and brought to center stage.
Erin Shirreff (b.1975) was born in British Columbia, Canada, and now lives and works in New York City. Still, Flat, and Far, a solo exhibition of her video, photographs, and sculpture, was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2010. Recent group exhibitions include Structure & Absence, White Cube, London; A Promise is a Cloud, Public Art Fund, New York; The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum; and To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?, The Power Plant, Toronto. She was artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in 2011 and recently received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New Yorker, Frieze, The New York Times, and Modern Painters and is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Standing Shadows
4 January - 10 March, 2012
Galeria Marta Cervera is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Erin Shirreff, Standing Shadows.
For the past few years Shirreff has explored how mediation affects our grasp of, and access to, experience. In her video, sculpture, and photography she creates open-ended encounters, often with singular forms, that at times evoke a sense of melancholy. They become meditations on our process of recognition, the anxiety and potential of indeterminacy, and the certainty of loss.
This exhibition, installed in the adjoining gallery spaces at General Castaños, 5, presents three discrete but related works that extend Shirreff's exploration of the ways we view and understand aesthetic objects, especially sculpture from the recent past which circulates primarily as image. Shirreff is interested in the physical sensation of a form that is seen only in reproduction—both the limitations created by the patina of 'historical image', and the potential embedded in what is largely an imaginary experience.
Monograph, 2011, is a set of six large-scale photographs documenting forms Shirreff has made in her Brooklyn studio that resemble minimalist or biomorphic mid-century sculpture. Isolated in an empty field, they are lit in a manner that accentuates their smooth surfaces and sharp geometry, but that also renders them materially strange and ambiguously scaled. Each photograph is folded in half and hinged open within the frame to echo the spread of a book. Further, four images are constructed of mismatched pairs, much like pre-press printer spreads. Taken together, the set becomes a complete, unbound 'signature' that spatially surrounds the viewer, inverting a conventional sculpture-viewer relationship.
In an adjacent gallery is Field, Shade, Leaf, Line, 2011, a five-minute looped slide dissolve program that features 160 images derived from reproductions in modern sculpture anthologies. Close-up, highly fragmented views of corners, footings, curves, surface reflections and flooring register in temporary alignment as the two projectors progress, to create new, if fleeting, abstract moments on the screen.
Untitled (Standing Shadows) (all 2011) is a collection of small-scale sculptures installed on a large pedestal in the gallery's central space. Made from pigmented gypsum, newspaper broadsheets, bent steel rods, and hand-cut sheets of painted aluminum, these provisional sculptures come together somewhat casually: forms lean against one another, stack, are held down or propped up. Shapes and fragments of shapes, forms and fragments of forms are echoed in each work, at times created by the sculptural components themselves, at others by the negative space they create. They appear both newly made and left behind, somehow caught on the margins and brought to center stage.
Erin Shirreff (b.1975) was born in British Columbia, Canada, and now lives and works in New York City. Still, Flat, and Far, a solo exhibition of her video, photographs, and sculpture, was held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2010. Recent group exhibitions include Structure & Absence, White Cube, London; A Promise is a Cloud, Public Art Fund, New York; The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum; and To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong?, The Power Plant, Toronto. She was artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation in 2011 and recently received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New Yorker, Frieze, The New York Times, and Modern Painters and is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.