Figure 2 (II)

Erin Shirreff works in a variety of mediums to include sculpture, photography, video, and prints. Central to her art is the engagement with art history, perception, memory, and memorialization. Shirreff explores modernist sculptures constructed with geometric forms that recall minimalist works made several decades earlier. Such three-dimensional works are frequently known exclusively through two-dimensional means, such as photographs found in journals, books, and powerpoint lectures. Shirreff explores the interactions between representation of the sculpture and the object itself, and the transformation inherent in such processes. In probing the difference in the ways in which one encounters and processes three-dimensional and two-dimensional objects, Shirreff challenges concept of scale. While the modernists works that her works evoke are often large in scale, the sculptures Shirreff's photographs are often quite small and made from such basic materials as foam core, cardboard, and plaster. Yet through her two-dimensional representations (either photography or print) the sculptures acquire a sense of monumentality and presence. Shirreff takes closeup photographs, which she tightly crops to create abstract compositions. In this way, she evokes yet another mode of perception, that of painting or drawing.