Erin Shirreff

Sculpture for Snow . 2011

Erin Shirreff . + aimia|ago . Lisa Cooley

Shirreff’s work plays with the relationship between appearance and the actual object,collapsing the things that we think we see with the actuality of compressed ash, plaster casts and pictures of pictures. All the action occurs on the surface; it is where our knowledge and the objects’ inherent references meet. It is also where the artificial nature of the works is revealed. Once the sleight of hand is exposed, and the viewer realizes what he is actually looking at, the stand-in nature of the works becomes apparent. It is not about the reference to moons, craters or architecture but much more about the process of recognition, about how something may appear to be a landscape, a head, drapery or a devil.
Anna Gritz