A.P. (no.1)

2012 - Photography (Photography)

Erin Shirreff

year born: 1975
gender: female
nationality: Canadian

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.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

Ponderosa Pine IV
© » KADIST

Rodney Graham

1991

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
© » KADIST

Rodney Graham

1996

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...

Cinema
© » KADIST

Fang Lu

2013

In the work Cinema , Fang Lu explores in a meticulous yet un-dramatic — almost casual — way of how “the self” in our today’s life is a controlled and staged construction of oneself...

Drag
© » KADIST

Xiaoyun Chen

2006

In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope...

Knotty Spell in Windy Drapes
© » KADIST

Haegue Yang

2016

A steel clothing rack adorned with turbine vents, Moroccan vintage jewelry, pinecones and knitting yarn, these heterogeneous elements are used here to create an exotic yet undefined identity within the work...

Pipe Opening
© » KADIST

Jeff Wall

2002

As suggested by its title, Pipe Opening (2002) depicts a hole in a wood wall exposed by the removal of a pipe...

War Footage
© » KADIST

Mauricio Ancalmo

2010

War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...

Fridge-Freezer
© » KADIST

Yoshua Okón

2015

Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...

Lightning
© » KADIST

Paul Kos

1976

Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon...

Untitled (Breathless)
© » KADIST

Ian Wallace

2000

Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...

Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan)
© » KADIST

Ian Wallace

1986

Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...

A poem written by 5 poets at once (first attempt)
© » KADIST

Koki Tanaka

2013

This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...

No World
© » KADIST

Fang Lu

2014

No World is an action-filled video work filmed inside an abandoned museum in the Songzhuang area outside Beijing...

Canton Novelty
© » KADIST

Fang Lu

2016

Canton Novelty by Fang Lu captures the adventure of a group of three girls, Ruohan, Lily and Zoe on a summer vacation in Guangzhou, China...

Strange Culture
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2007

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...

PANGKIS
© » KADIST

Yee I-Lann

2021

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance...

Borrando la Frontera
© » KADIST

Ana Teresa Fernández

2011

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...

Flutter
© » KADIST

Zarouhie Abdalian

2010

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...

One Universe, One God, One Nation
© » KADIST

Yin-Ju Chen

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)...