Fri, Jan 10, 2025 → Sat, Mar 1, 2025
Erin Curtis
Lineage is comprised of cut-canvas paintings inspired by craft, nature, repetition, and decoration. The title refers to both the understanding and perpetuation of the vernacular of textiles that are often abstractions created largely by women, as well as the process by which the paintings have been created. Obscuring, dense and overgrown, Curtis’s paintings offer no fixed perspective, while her double-layered works present rich surfaces that reference the physical and visual qualities of textiles.
A touchstone of Curtis’s practice is her connection with handmade items, particularly those produced by women and made less for enterprise or profit than out of a desire to protect their homes and families, bless marriages and births, and ward off danger. They are imbedded in a language that is influenced by nature and necessity across time and geographies. Curtis seeks to carry on this language as a way of celebrating life and beauty. Particularly inspirational are woven carpets of Moroccan desert communities that formed the walls between home and the vastness of their arid landscapes, and the bold abstractions of Gees Bend quilts that turned outgrown clothes and surplus fabrics into blankets and a genre of new American collage.