Erin Shirreff

“If photography is about light and sculpture about material, Shirreff’s work makes an unresolvable knot of the two that’s as beautiful as it is puzzling.” — Murray White, Boston Globe

A feeling of suspended animation haunts the work of Canadian artist Erin Shirreff (born 1975), melding historical reference and the present tense of live encounter. Shirreff favors the stark geometries of mid-20th-century abstraction, and often engages works of art—Donald Judd’s concrete buildings, Tony Smith’s monoliths—to ask broader questions about the act of looking. Contemplating what is lost and gained when art is filtered through the camera’s eye, Shirreff’s spare, evocative works compel new forms of attention.

This is the first comprehensive monograph to capture the breadth of her studio practice, richly illustrated and featuring new scholarship by art historians Megan R. Luke, Kate Nesin, Taylor Walsh and Jeffrey Weiss, and an original text on Shirreff’s experiments with cyanotype by author Rivka Galchen.