Translation is the key maneuver in the work of Erin Shirreff (b. 1975), who poses fundamental questions about how art is received and remembered. Though trained as a sculptor, Shirreff tends to draw on other disciplines, revealing how sculpture’s defining traits—real space, live encounter—can materialize across formats. These “hybrid scenarios,” as she describes them, recur throughout the exhibition: sculptures are photographed or inspired by vintage photographs or pieced together from printed sources; video is slowed to blur distinctions of still and moving image.

Each work is a wedge that pries open the space between representation and the thing itself, and lifts its visual language of stark geometries from 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, she 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.

The exhibition’s title, Folded stone, implies both a certain concreteness and an impossibility, wresting untold potential from a given shape or substance. A set of recent sculptures, for instance, have a provisional quality that belies the permanence of bronze, forged as lasting iterations of flimsier props Shirreff made in the studio from cardboard and foamcore. Telltale signs of those humble origins appear on close inspection: the dinged edge of a once-yielding surface, seams joined with cast remnants of hot glue. Shirreff initially crafts such objects only to be photographed, and a series of related tabletop forms appear in black-and-white prints, which join two disparate plaster models along a central axis. The prints are creased along this dividing line to take on a sculptural dimension, splayed open like loose spreads unbound from an absent book.

Like most sculpture enthusiasts, Shirreff sees more examples on the page than she does in person, and her work often weighs what happens when art is filtered through the camera’s eye. The shards of color assembled in low reliefs are enlarged offset images of anonymous sculptures, scanned from used books and reconstellated within deep frames. Here icons of art history vie for space with its also-rans, implying the arbitrariness of the canon—who endures and who is forgotten. Another work in aluminum, the freestanding Dusk Form, derives less directly from a photograph, as Shirreff solidifies a sculpture she came across in reproduction and imaginatively fills in its unseen angles. Dusk Form jars with its monumental scale—more suited to an urban plaza than a museum’s interior—and changes dramatically as one moves around it, jutting into its surroundings before flattening out, as if fitted to the photographic plane. A final work, Still, further dilates those dynamics of looking, using editing software to knit hundreds of images into a seemingly endless scroll. The video’s glacial pan across a monochrome field resets the viewer’s internal clock; as with each of Shirreff’s spare, evocative works, it compels new forms of attention.

Text by Taylor Walsh

THANK YOU

Support for Folded stone is generously provided by the SITE SANTA FE Board of Directors; the SITE SANTA FE Exhibitions Fund; James Cahn and Jeremiah Collatz; Rosina Yue; Sikkema Jenkins & Co.; Bradley Ertaskiran; the City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the 1% Lodgers Tax;New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs; and by the National Endowment of the Arts

Organized by Curator Brandee Caoba, with Max Holmes, Exhibitions Manager and Registrar, Sabrina Griffith, Associate Registrar, and Samantha Manion-Chavez, Curatorial Assistant