Month: October 2015

Erin Morrison

Erin Morrison, “Black Palm (no. 1)”, 2015, Ink and Wax on Hydrocal, 35.5 x 37.5

Erin Morrison is a 2014 graduate of UCLA’s MFA program, and has exhibited with Samuel Freeman gallery in Culver City. She grew up in Arkansas and received her BFA from Memphis College of Art. She previously lived in New York and Seattle, relocating to Los Angeles in 2011. Here, she teaches and maintains a studio practice.

Her work considers both the domestic and the institutional conditions of painting, combining the visual language of pattern common to textile design alongside heavy gestures associated with modernist painting. Spanning the processes of printmaking, painting, ceramic, and quilting, her work is linked to considerations of the reproducible graphic as well as the meditative act of creating a singular, unique object.

Made of Hydrocal (a cross between concrete and plaster), Morrison’s biggest pieces are more than 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide. Set in solid wood frames, each leans against the main gallery’s walls. The surfaces of her works are where the details reside. Individual stitches, woven fabrics, palm fronds and air bubbles can be seen. Each is the result of Morrison’s laborious process: gather fabrics, sew a quilt, lay it flat, build a mold, pour in Hydrocal, let it dry, tear out the quilt and then begin painting the cast slab.

Pierre Matter

Steampunk Sculptures by Pierre Matter

French sculptor Pierre Matter’s body of work thematically revolves around the surreal idea of featuring a combination of organic and mechanical materials in one entity. His sculptures reflect a robotic evolution of living beings and animals, transforming their likeness into multilayered cyborgs. The artist’s mythological, mechanized creatures re-evaluate the way one interprets lifeforms in reality. The artist says, “Even the cows of the mountains are nothing more than milk machines.”

Matter adds, “The way I blend cogs, pistons, integrated circuits and other accessories of the industrial world into beings, bodies or faces, my sculptures, directly follows from the way human life has evolved in recent times. Of course, we are only at the beginning of an era where the use of machines or micromachines embedded within living beings may well become widespread, but it is already the case that modern life is completely unthinkable without technology.”