Erin Trefry
If The Moon Turns Green
September 7 - October 12, 2019
Installation View: Erin Trefry, If The Moon Turns Green
Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present If The Moon Turns Green, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Erin Trefry. The show will feature a series of new works including paintings, assemblages, and sculptures that are composed of various materials including oil paint, ceramics, and sartorial objects such as clothing, shoes, and handbags.
As a kind of personal archaeology, her latest works use materials from family: her father's sweatshirt, her mother's purse handles, her grandmother's shoes, and drawer pulls from the family's home. Deconstructed wicker, acrylic, and leather fragments are knotted together with zip ties to metallic ceramic pieces. The symmetrical crustacean-like forms look flayed or dissected, mask-like, or pelvic. About the size of an armored breastplate, each work has a spine. Some of the assemblages sit on panels of stretched fabric and some directly on the wall. Some works are bound with rope or have braided lengths falling from their surfaces. Meant to make us think about our human form, they reference the body's interior and exterior with skin and bone concealed and strategically revealed.
Trefry has recently started to incorporate ceramic pieces alongside found objects. Using such an array of materials from synthetic to earthly is an elemental aspect of her process. The artist uses clay alongside pleather and denim to perform a kind of alchemy, transforming earth, air, fire, and water into artworks with poetic meaning.
In one work, Impermanent time that weeps, 2018, a piece of green leather rests on a tall panel of dark denim. At the center, two circular wicker handles frame a dark flowering ceramic form. Like all of Trefry's work, the piece feels devotional and shamanistic—utilizing charged materials in combinations to form something new and universal. The artist uses imagery of our bodies, and objects from our lives to address our own humanity and mortality. Remains are transmuted into new life.
The exhibition's title, If The Moon Turns Green, is from a Sonny Stitt record that was given to the artist by her father, another family heirloom.
Erin Trefry lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Trefry creates paintings, sculptures, and assemblages with objects that are personally charged. Recent arrangements combine ceramic fragments with clothing and accessories from her family to resemble armor or masks. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and has studied at Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA; ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA; AICAD/New York Studio Program, New York, NY; and Parsons Paris Study Abroad Program, Paris, France. Trefry’s work has appeared in group exhibitions across Los Angeles at No Gallery, TSA LA, 0-0 LA, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Monte Vista Projects, ODD ARK•LA, Eastside International, Big Pictures Los Angeles, there-there, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).
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