SITE Santa Fe presents Folded stone, a solo exhibition by Erin Shirreff, whose spare, evocative works pose fundamental questions about how art is received and remembered. Folded stone is on view from March 8 through May 27, 2024.
Though trained as a sculptor, Shirreff centers her practice on acts of material translation, revealing how sculpture’s defining traits—real space, live encounter—adjust when filtered through other formats. These “hybrid scenarios,” as the artist describes them, recur throughout the exhibition: a new monumental sculpture, for instance, is inspired by grainy images of a mid-century example; photographs are printed and then cut or creased to gain near-sculptural dimension; the glacial pan of a digital video conflates still and moving image.
Each work is a wedge that pries open the space between representation and the thing itself, and shares a visual language drawn from the stark geometries of mid-century abstraction—a touchstone for Shirreff, whose work loosely channels the authority of that bygone era, asking what (if any) of its utopian aspirations are still palpable in the present. Ultimately, Shirreff points to how art is accessed, both in person and in reproduction, delivering a heightened viewing experience that defies the leveling effects of our screen-based world.
An artist talk between between Erin Shirreff and Arturo Herrera, on the occasion of their concurrent solo exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, will be held on Saturday, March 9, at 2 PM. The conversation will be moderated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. To learn more, click here.
Erin Shirreff (b.1975, British Columbia, Canada) currently lives and works in Montreal. She earned an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions of Shirreff's work have been held at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2021–22); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2016); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) (2016); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015). This is her first institutional exhibition in New Mexico.
