Erin Shirreff’s A. P. series of prints investigates how objects are “constructed” at the level of the image. For each composite photograph, Shirreff fabricates two sculptural forms from what appear to be metal or plaster, although the precise materials are unidentified. Her sculptures resemble miniature architectural models or renderings of buildings as-yet-to-be fully conceptualized, both elemental and elegant in their use of sharp angles and clean lines. Shirreff then photographs each object against a similarly monochromatic backdrop in her studio, printing each image in rich and high-contrast greyscale. Next, she folds each print in half vertically so that the objects depicted in the image appear to be bisected. Finally, she adjoins the two folded prints at the edge of the fold, creating a new pictorial form from the two bisected images. The hybridized forms depicted in her prints resemble a jarring juxtaposition of geometric sturdiness and malleable plasticity, a cross between Tony Smith’s monolithic minimalism and Alexander Calder’s surreal wiriness. Shirreff uses photography here to imagine sculptural forms that do not exist in real life, and her work employs an illusionistic quality indebted to artistic traditions of trompe l’oeil. But Shirreff also reveals the artifice behind these images, suggesting that all pictorial representations are constructed and, in effect, can never fully document or replicate the experience of encountering an object in “real” perceptual space.
Erin Shirreff creates composite images that interrogate presumed boundaries between artifice and documentary. Originally trained as a sculptor, she works in the expanded field of photography, video, and sculpture, and her practice frequently employs multiple fine arts disciplines at once. Her work reconsiders the limits of sculptural practice by showing how image-based media can effectively be used to render hybridized shapes that do not (and arguably cannot) exist in real life. At the same time, she also reveals how these images are always deliberately constructed, leaving fold lines exposed and obvious discontinuities and aberrances in her composites. In leaving these artificial traces behind, Shirreff’s reminds us that images are always fabricated on some level and that representation itself is an artifice at its core.
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies...
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)...