Erin Curtis

Austin-based artist and Fulbright scholar Erin Curtis presents a solo exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures depicting overlapping visions of architectural history, interior decoration, and obsessive patterning.

Large lush paintings, drawings and hanging panels depict malls as vacant ruins, General Motors’ headquarters subsumed in mushrooming foliage, a cell-phone tower dwarfing an iconic modernist home. Overlaying both the architecture and the flora are geometric patterns, which describe and confuse the space within the paintings and the gallery. Drawn from Egyptian tombs, 19th century Indian tapestries, and Victorian floral wallpapers, they create a cacophony of interlocking visual fields where the flat space of the patterns struggles against the skewed pictorial space of the paintings, eliciting an off-balance, cubist sense of spatial possibility.

A focus on built environments binds the diverse elements of the installation. Gathered from varied sources, the pieces depict objects of constructed fantasy now shuttered, abandoned or for sale, inspiring dueling feelings of desire and revulsion. Using architecture and decoration as both subject and substance, Curtis’ installation describes multiple visions of space and structure, pattern and perspective, all situated in an unsettlingly familiar near-future.