Erin Shirreff: Sunset Palace

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Sunset Palace, a solo exhibition of recent work by Erin Shirreff on view from September 6 through October 19, 2024.

The exhibition is dominated by Dusk Form, a new large-scale sculpture first exhibited in Shirreff’s recent solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. Approached from one angle, the form appears dimensional, imposing, only to flatten into a series of abrupt planes, deep cuts, and line as one walks to the side and rear. The sculpture has a monolithic presence that references familiar sculptural language from the mid-twentieth century, but the fragmentary nature of this sequence of views points to its origin in a half-remembered image glimpsed online. In Dusk Form, Shirreff reconstitutes a hazy impression with massive, conjoined planes of patinated and polished aluminum that exude heft and mass. Named for the time of day rife with perceptual ambiguities, Dusk Form plays with our sense of scale; viewed from afar it can recall a simple construction of folded paper.

Included in the exhibition are new wall-based works that continue Shirreff’s interest in collage and the printed page. As in earlier works in this mode, Shirreff translates scans of images from art anthologies, and, in this case, vintage commercial photography into imaginary assemblages that come together through an informal stacking arrangement within deep-set frames. The original images are cropped and enlarged past legibility but a sense of their scale and materiality remains visible through the patterned veil of offset reproduction dots and rosettes. Paper sculpture, the largest example on view, creates a composite form of plaster, stone, painted metal, and wood that nods to its paper origins, while Untitled rearranges fragments of a single image into an impossible structure that vividly intersects foreground and background.

The process of making these collages informs a new set of leaning metal sculptures in the show. Large sheets of raw Cor-ten steel feature cutouts of shapes that, layered atop one another, create a curving and linear tracery. The works recall a series Shirreff began ten years ago, titled Drop, which saw leftover metal shapes, both positive and negative, hanging from poles or leaning against the gallery walls in asymmetrical compositions. These new works are rectilinear, comprised of a series of open frameworks that evoke portals, windows, or gates. The circularity of Shirreff’s working method here and throughout the show is seen again in the back gallery with Prototype, a new video that reforms footage found online of an artist at a pottery wheel into an unending loop of making and unmaking.

Sunset Palace will also feature Shirreff’s Maquette (standing curve), a recent bronze sculpture from a series she began in 2019, and a collection of new small-scale works fabricated in steel that derive from digital forms pictured in an early photo series. These open constructions strike a delicate balance between tangible materiality and incomplete dimensionality that is echoed throughout the exhibition.