June 8 through August 4, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 8, 7-10PM
Erynn Richardson is a reluctant romantic, but you wouldn’t get that when experiencing her intricately constructed mixed media etchings. Her new show, “Ethereal Echoes,” which opens Saturday, June 8 at Bermudez Projects in Downtown Los Angeles, consists of more than twenty artworks in which the artist tries to capture the essence of objects she’s struggled not to be attached to; yet by the extremely elaborate nature of her work process, shows us how attached to them she actually is.
“The notion of nostalgia is a romantic idea that I am skeptical of,” states the artist. “However, I find that I am unable to overcome the feelings I have for certain items I own.”
For a young modern artist, her methods and materials – mulberry paper, beeswax, etching, and sewing – are very old fashioned; and for a skeptic, she’s an expert at conjuring romance and nostalgia.
Richardson’s process is complex and layered with meaning. She starts with an object from her collection – “a souvenir,” she writes, “a relic, gift, or heirloom, an artifact from nature” – which might be a female relative’s shawl, or a fig.
Richardson then makes line etchings of the item, creates multiple prints on thin mulberry paper, and then makes these prints translucent by ironing beeswax onto them. She cuts up the prints, reassembles them into new shapes, and then sews them onto larger pieces of heavy paper. The stitches are so perfect and tiny, you’d swear Richardson jobbed them out to a munchkin seamstress, but this isn’t the case as the artist has been seen at work, hand-sewing these flimsy shapes to the paper, peering through a huge lighted magnifying glass.
The resulting shapes are organic. The three pieces in the “Fig” series are realistic re-imaginings of disembodied dark-brown depictions of fig clusters on a tree. “Pelts: State One” recalls a moss-draped Southern tree in an old etching of a plantation. “Possession; The Fur: State One,” conjures myriad images of dyed autumn hues of muted browns, olive drab, oranges and yellows.
The effect, as Richardson writes, is “ephemeral and ghostly.” The sheets flutter in the slightest breeze, the layers obscure the colors and shapes, random loose threads intertwine like pea vines or wave like bug antennae.
To the viewer, her pieces are like a pleasantly melancholy walk by a brook on a fall day, with a storm threatening. But to the artist, they’re an effort to address her frustration at being attached to physical things, to overcome personal longing.
“Most of us possess items we’re emotionally attached to,” states Richardson, “which bear the burden of nostalgia; they represent a moment that is no longer present.”
“Ethereal Echoes” is Richardson’s first solo show. A twenty-something native of California, she recently earned her MFA from California State University at Long Beach. Her works have been included in several group and two-artist shows throughout Southern California, garnering tremendous interest.
