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In The Last Word, Erin contemplates the complexities of communication with hospital staff during the birth of Townes, and her summoning the strength to attempt a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Cesarean, which many medical practitioners try to avoid). The shapely forms of Interceptor include copper wire, referencing women’s health and IUDs, and, sadly, the menacing intrusion of politics in this ultimately personal sphere. Lamma Rain evokes the subtropical atmosphere during Erin’s early morning runs or open water swims on Lamma Island. Similarly, Moon Summoning was made while Erin was living in Colorado, where she spent many winter evenings observing the pink moon over the snowy hillside.
The artist Lari Pittman, Erin’s professor during her UCLA MFA days, once pointed out the “call-and-response” aspect in her work.
The call and response is characterized by a musical phrase that is then returned in a related form in the next passage. In Erin’s paintings, shapes and silhouettes in one painting reappear or resemble those in the works that follow. These passages are like echoes of each other, or like the resemblance between a mother and child. There are also call-and-response exchanges to forebears and peers who serve as inspiration to Morrison, such as Judy Chicago, Miyoko Ito, Loie Hollowell, Hilma Af Klimt, and others.
The paintings are a meditation on time: there is the length of the lifetime and lived experience that is conjured and poured into the physical paintings. There is the time it takes for the gypsum to set. And then, the brevity and balance of time as Erin works with distemper, a pigment based in animal skin glue with rapid drying times that necessitate a deftness of hand.
The exhibition’s title pulls from a piece of writing in which Morrison has found resonance, by the author and historian Rebecca Solnit: “There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone.”
Erin’s response to Solnit’s call: “I have always found a raw power in Etruscan art, particularly the tradition of painted bas-relief. After spending time in Sicily, I better understand the value of preservation. The longer something remains in living memory, the more value it holds. Americans do not live with this sensibility. We are always in a state of renovation. I find there is a value in looking back for inspiration, to other cultures, to the aesthetics and traditions that brought us to where we are today.”
In this new show at Oolong Gallery, which includes brand new works made this year as well as a selection of pieces made over the course of the ten years that I have known Erin, we watch her executing the pleat and embracing the wrinkles that inevitably arise.
Further preview available upon request: info@oolongallery.com
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