September 13 - February 28, 2021
A solo exhibition featuring work by Erin M. Riley.
From the gallery:
“Erin M. Riley, A Reminder of Being There, her first solo exhibition of new works with the gallery.
Erin M. Riley is a fiber artist who makes large-scale tapestries using a centuries-old hand weaving process. For her work, Riley sources yarn from shuttered textile mills around the United States; she then washes, strips and hand-dyes the wool before weaving on a Macomber loom. Her finely wrought wool and cotton weavings rely on implied narrative and personal history, ingeniously toggling between access and obscurity. This exhibition will feature her meticulously crafted, tapestries depicting intimate scenes that reflect on relationships, memories, fantasies, addiction, sexual violence and trauma.
“The images I weave are consumed and scrolled past at a speed that is maddening, but tapestry stays slow,” says Riley. At the same time, the process of sitting at the loom “allows for a total disconnect from the internet while also having a connection to binary and early computer technology.”
The showcase work of the exhibition, a monumental tapestry, hangs on the far wall of the second gallery. Scared, 2019, depicts a pair of padlocks interlinked and hanging from bit a chain on a fence made of thick wire-woven into a pattern of diamond shapes. At the bottom is a closed-caption, “I am scared to death.”, hints of screen-ratio black bars, top and bottom, give away this poignant image as a video-still, which Riley shares from an episode of the reality-television series, Intervention. Across the room, a tapestry hangs – a night-scene of a single-vehicle accident. Of this ongoing series of work, Riley says, “I started weaving the car crashes as an investigation of trauma in a literal sense, but I soon started thinking about the cars and how judgment and perception is placed on accidents, and wondering why all bodies aren’t afforded the same considerations.”
904 Marshall St.
Houston, 77006 Texas
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