Erin Shirreff explores relationship between photography and sculptural forms
Leading artist Mona Hatoum featured in new exhibition drawn from the ICA’s Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women
(BOSTON—July 31, 2015) – On Aug. 26, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens two new exhibitions: Erin Shirreff in the Fotene Demoulas Gallery and Mona Hatoum in the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery.
Erin Shirreff
Aug. 26 – Nov. 29
Working across media with a focus on material and the analogue, Brooklyn-based artist Erin Shirreff (b. 1975, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada) explores the intertwined relationship between sculpture and photography. Covering several years of the emerging artist’s work, Erin Shirreff includes both sculptures and photographs that investigate the complexities of representing sculptural objects in two dimensions. In series such as “Monograph” Shirreff photographs sculptures she creates by hand expressly for that purpose. Alongside these photographs will be several large sculptures, among them a series called “Drops.” For these, Shirreff creates shapes by hand-cutting scraps of paper, enlarging them, and cutting them into sheets of steel. The exhibition also presents the video Medardo Rosso Madame X, 1896 (2013), a 24-minute silent work Shirreff created by manipulating copies of an image of a sculpture by proto-modernist Medardo Rosso, then assembling them digitally. The exhibition brings together fourteen works of sculpture, photography and video including two new large-scale cyanotype photograms.
Shirreff studied at the University of Victoria, in B.C., and received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2005. She has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions, and has received a number of awards, including the Aimia/AGO Photography Prize, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2013), The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant (2011), and the Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant (2011).
Erin Shirreff is organized by Jenelle Porter, Mannion Family Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
Mona Hatoum
Aug. 26 – Nov. 29
Over the past three decades, Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut, Lebanon) has explored the fine line between the familiar and the uncanny with her visceral body of work. Through the juxtaposition of incongruous materials, changes of scale, or the introduction of contradictory elements, she infuses commonplace and even banal objects with an element of danger, references to violence, or the capacity to inflict bodily harm. In doing so, Hatoum engages the tactile imagination; her sculptures, photographs, and videos incite viewers to imagine their own bodies in relation to these unruly objects. The myriad and often conflicting allusions speak both to the history of conflict in the artist’s homeland and to the comfort and safety provided by the domestic realm. The eight works of sculpture and photography that comprise Mona Hatoum are drawn entirely fromgifts to the ICA/Boston by the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women.
Hatoum’s work has been presented in solo and group shows around the world, and is currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.