1905 Building

In her work across media, Erin Shirreff (Canadian, born 1975) mines the network that connects sculpture to its photographic representation. Her acclaimed and interrelated bodies of work include video studies of individual photographs, cut-metal and poured-plaster sculptural assemblages, interruptive and overlapping photographs and collages, and photographic canvases, which depict forms that refer to her sculpture. In an age when the ubiquity of smartphones has effectively collapsed the firsthand viewing of art with the creation of its representation, Shirreff explores the many ways we still try to access or “grasp” objects: through the photographic images we circulate, the art historical narratives we construct, and the time we dedicate to absorption. As much as our encounters with Shirreff’s artworks are corporeal—we physically and sensorially navigate the scale, texture, stuff, and weight of these objects and traces—their dialogue with history is also phantasmagoric. They ask us to enter the spaces between objects and our memories of them, and between representation and its history.