November 18 – January 20, 2024

Opening reception: November 18, 2023

Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce Spatial Moto, an exhibition of new and recent work by Erin Shirreff and the artist's second presentation with the gallery.

Shirreff works in photography, sculpture, and video, but across all mediums her work is fundamentally image-based. Her practice is rooted in the studio and in process: material translations from two- to three-dimensions (or from three- to two-) or from analog to digital (and vice versa) are what form her diverse but interrelated bodies of work. Running throughout, and consistently for almost two decades, is her curiosity about different modes of attention, and what happens within the uncertain moments of an aesthetic encounter.

Since 2018, Shirreff has explored the sculptural possibilities of dye sublimation printing, a process by which substrate and image fuse to become one. For these large, wall-based works—four recent examples are on view here—she scans images from sculpture anthologies published in the last 80 years and prints enlarged image fragments onto aluminum sheets. She cuts the prints into shaped panels and leans them against each other in collaged compositions within deep-set frames. Shirreff's source material is legible if not identifiable: vivid colors and textures abut and cohere with a structural logic that suggests an impossible dimensionality, all while remaining resolutely flat. The images' colors evoke the eras of their publication, so, contained within the vitrine-like frames, these works can feel like historical artifacts from an uncertain moment in the recent past.

The three sand-cast bronze sculptures in this show grew out of a digital photo series Shirreff made a decade ago that featured spliced-together foam core structures that could only exist in picture form. The series was inspired by documentation of mid-century abstract sculpture and from a distance these new sculptures—cast 1:1 in bronze and patinated black—echo this austere formal vocabulary given their simple compositions of intersecting planes and curves. But on closer, slower inspection the material eccentricities of their foam-core origins transmit clearly and uncannily: surface dents from fingertips squeezing too hard, jagged hand-cut edges, haphazard hot-glue joints that now look like metal welds. Shirreff’s sculptures are heavy and delicate, flat and dimensional, imperfect but precise. Titled Maquette—Shirreff refers to these works as “monuments to drafts”—they share qualities with architectural models, studies in geometry or diagrams, but are none of these things alone. They resist classification while being definitively what they are, no more, no less.

Much of Shirreff's work circles back to an oblique investigation into the passage of time. She explores the way we apprehend images, objects, experiences, and ideas, and how our perceptions (and how we perceive) shift over time. Her work reminds us of how adrift in our own moment we really are. What is the past—always everywhere around us, in us—still saying? What are we seeing when we look at it, if we even can? Shirreff’s work and studio process are bonded to notions of uncertainty and incompletion as much as they are rooted in material culture and embodied encounters. Art is a recurring motif in Shirreff’s work, not to be self-reflexive but to underline the process—the act—of looking when thinking through these questions. For Shirreff, an open-ended encounter is where answers can be felt if not entirely understood.

Erin Shirreff, born in 1975 in British Columbia, lives and works in Montreal. Shirreff has mounted solo shows at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kunsthalle Basel; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A solo exhibition of her work will open at SITE Santa Fe in March 2024. Her work has been included in recent shows at the Common Guild (Glasgow); Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Fondazione Prada (Milan); KANAL—Centre Pompidou (Brussels); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus); and Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris); Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art (New York); National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was an artist in residence at Artpace (San Antonio) in 2013 and the Chinati Foundation (Marfa) in 2011.