Ruth Erickson

Title: 
Mannion Family Curator
Last Name: 
Erickson
Head Shot: 
Bio: 

Ruth Erickson is Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where she has curated exhibitions of work by Kevin Beasley, Mark Dion, Rokni and Ramin Haerizadeh, Ethan Murrow, and Wangechi Mutu, among others. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including France and the Visual Arts since 1945: Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art (2018), Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist (2017), Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 (2015), Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (2015), and Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology (2014).

Affiliation: 
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Heather Rubinstein

My work signals its history from the material properties of fabrics—what happens when the fabrics are subjected to various procedures: cutting, folding, sewing, staining, dyeing, and brushwork. For my purposes, domestic fabrics such as bedsheets or drapes (always sourced from thrift stores) work better than traditional canvas. I like their porousness and flexibility as well as their status as recycled, repurposed products. My paintings are informed by postwar European abstraction (Alberto Burri, Supports/Surfaces, Sigmar Polke) and the Pattern & Decoration movement, but I try to avoid

SV Randall

My work examines the relationship between consumer, commodity, and transformation. Within a culture of feverish consumption and retinal impatience I often make “fast” objects by the slowest means possible. The resulting sculptures, photographs, and installations represent overlooked objects rendered in symbolic materials.

Amy Nathan

I apply pressure to images and language to crack them open, make them tactile, and dilate them into an expanded space. Images and words are my starting points for painted, faceted sculptures, in which I complicate and play with an internal/ external push-and-pull. My work speaks to many subjects— politics and power, the body’s visceral reaction to its environment, conversations between the haptic and the retinal—but there is a consistency in my examination of forces in opposition, and a need to open up and aerate an idea. My pieces incorporate visual puns:

Shalen Stephenson

I work within the realm of abstraction, exposing the visually unknown through a process of superimposing layers of paint and other materials on a substrate. I am interested in incorporating materials and processes from traditional painting practices along with commercial and industrial applications. I continuously build on systematic modes of production while also trying to disrupt and counteract my personal desires to create a harmonious composition. I am fascinated with creating and referencing contemporary visual languages, subsuming,

Kurosh Yahyai

I am interested in portraying primitive human emotions. Emotions such anxiety, anger, compulsion, sex, fear, confusion, self-doubt, lust, and existential questioning. My intention is for the viewer to experience a visceral reaction to the work. Tension in my work is important as I create a familiar/comfortable space that is also unsettling and alien for the viewer. The familiar/ comfortable elements can be interpreted through the objects in the paintings referencing the home, while the surface treatments and manipulations of these elements can give an unknown feeling.

CD Wu

My practice combines minimal pencil drawings of simplified, whimsical forms with large-scale canvases and idiosyncratic neon sculpture. I start by bending and shaping the neon tubes that will later inform the graphite images. The paintings, then, play with an understanding of “light” in representational painting by the literal presence of a light-emitting element. The “light” in the paintings operates, at once, as representational form (tree, cloud, goldfish, flower), line, color, light source, and as a commentary on the relationship among all four. In the Duchampian tradition, I

Johanna Winters

I investigate anxieties of the female experience as it relates to aging, vanity, shame, restraint, and pleasure, in order to confront the social conditioning that perpetuates the repression of feminine desire, and prioritizes and encourages male pleasure. Through puppetry, drawing, and printmaking, I bridge the genres of performance and visual art to consider how female desire is inhibited, enacted, sustained, and diminished between the spectrum of adolescence and end of life.

Megan St. Clair

Emotional identities and intimacies fascinate me. Although these conditions cannot be clearly defined, I enjoy the struggle of attempting to examine them or create new questions asking what we think we know about ourselves. My goal is to question these complicated qualities of closeness through painting, sewing, or drawing.

Vaughn Spann

By critiquing both past and present histories of ecological atrocity, this series of paintings subvert dominant global narratives while envisioning new ones. Through an exploration of symbiotic relationships, the figures in my work have stakes and agency in their environments. Drawing on parallels within form, color, and space allows me to investigate the potential for what I consider metamorphic organic poetry.

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