Another look
Erin Shirreff takes art, then views it in a whole new way at the Clark.
Erin Shirreff ’s works “Bronze” and “Four-color café terrace,” both on view at the Clark, are like visual art versions of that old game Telephone — where you start with a word, whisper it around a circle and end up with something entirely different.
To create “Bronze,” she used a page from an art history book (written by Julia Busch) that reproduced a picture (taken by photographer Rudy Burckhardt) of a bronze sculpture (made by artist David Silva), which was inspired by ancient
Roman marbles. Shirreff enlarged the print enough to reveal the traces of the sculptor’s hand, printed it on aluminum sheets, cut up the sheets and arranged them in a frame.
The result is an enigmatic, layered composition that bears no obvious resemblance to the source material, yet is intimately connected with it. Shirreff followed a similar process with “Four-color café terrace,” using a print of a photograph of a terra cotta sculpture by Anthony Caro, based on a Henri Matisse oil painting from 1915. Here, the circular and blocky shapes in her work retain an echo of the original — filtered through four incarnations in multiple mediums, created over 100 years.
As these two works suggest, Shirreff is fascinated by the “experience of looking,” and specifically the disparity between encountering art in three-dimensional space as opposed to on the page or the screen.
“An image literally flattens the experience of an object onto the page — in the case of sculpture, you’re only seeing one side of it,” she said in a recent interview from her home base in Montreal. (A native of British Columbia, she holds an MFA from Yale and spent many years living and working in New York City.) “There’s something about that I’ve always found inherently compelling — the object you
can’t fully grasp on the page. I love the mystery. There are all these layers and veils between you as a viewer and the original gesture of the artist — that first moment when the artist manipulated the material.”
“Remainders,” a selection of the artist’s recent work, will be at the Clark through January 2022, mounted not in a gallery but in nontraditional viewing spaces. Her series “Figs” hangs in the museum’s library, which makes sense, Shirreff says, because the pieces chosen for the show “come out of my own love of looking at books, specifically looking at artwork on the printed page — the limitations of that experience but also the imaginative possibilities that come from looking at images you don’t completely understand.”
For “Figs,” an ongoing series, Shirreff constructs small plaster objects, photographs them
and then slices the images and combines them in new ways. The scale of the objects, the relationship between them and their material are all ambiguous to the viewer.
“The end result is an image that looks like a whole object, but then you realize it’s actually made of two different halves,” she said. “So part of the work is a recognition that there’s all this missing information — there’s a strong sense of incompletion." Also on view at the Clark is her 39-minute video, “Still,” a seamless loop that tracks through textured, grayscale images of static objects in informal arrangements. They might be buildings in a nighttime city or machines in an abandoned factory, or something else entirely. Intentionally slow and meditative, “Still” invites the viewer to simply watch, without recognizing or categorizing what they’re seeing.
“That moment when you surrender yourself to an object can be very unnerving — you don’t quite know what you’re looking at or what it means,” Shirreff reflected. “I think it takes time for that experience to unfold and be meaningful, and I don’t know how equipped we are to pay that kind of attention anymore. I think it’s why people end up taking pictures in museums — they can think they’ll go back and look at it later. It gives a certain level of comfort, like you’ve grasped something even if you haven’t.”