ERICA STOLLER
My work is about what it’s made of. Selecting and arranging industrial and recycled materials involved touching, folding, pulling, bending...becoming familiar with the possibilities and the limits in a direct and tactile way, but with physicality and character of its own.
For some time I paid close attention to cables and wires, the landscape that surrounds us, in plain sight but often overlooked. While the work may reference the power and communication infrastructure, the materials were familiar parts of everyday life: plastic pipes, parachute cord, even hula hoops and swimming noodles were used without consideration of their original intention. Shapes, textures, colors, configurations told the story.
Other installations have been made of natural rope, stretched from wall to wall, or outdoors from tree to tree. The lines indicated planes and seemed to enclose space. The zing/zap where the “wires” overlap might have been accented with colorful knots of parachute cord.
These impersonal materials bear the traces of handwork, not engineering. Tactile and tensile qualities, (“Please touch”) may involve motion and sound too. The work was light and easy to assemble...and equally easy to dismantle. I was committed to this impermanence: perch lightly on the ground and, then, go away. The pieces were photographed during construction and documented on completion. Forms, planes, textures, surfaces...voids and shadows....are the important elements.
The trajectory of the work has always been toward simplification. Maybe less wasn’t more, but it was plenty to deal with. Imagine my surprise, then, as the recent cardboard pieces began to tell a different story. Wrinkled, crinkled and complicated, they reflect my attention to strata of sedimentary rock seen in cuts for road construction. Building incremental layers of recycled cardboard indicates geology, on one hand, and describes the physical qualities of the material on the other. The simple material has complicated secrets that are visible in vertical and horizontal slices, cuts, folds, bends, layers...and surprising variations in color, too.
www.ericastoller.com
CV
Past Solo Exhibitions:
Item # 25-033, 2022 Unseen Scenery, 2018 Gravity Feed, 2015
Past Group Exhibitions: please come flying, 2022 23°47', 2°27', 2°51', 2021. SYMPOIESIS, 2020 (s)(o)(f)(t) (w)(i)(n)(d)(o)(w)(s), 2020 Eleven x Seventeen, 2019 NADA House, 2019
Women On The Line, 2017
Who Cares?, 2017
New Art In An Old House, 2016
Wish You Were Here, 2016
Razzle Dazzle, 2016
A.I.R. ReFreshed, 2015
Unframed, 2015
If These Walls... II, 2015
Traverse, 2014
Pumping Up The Volume At A.I.R., 2014
Wet Paint, 2014
If These Walls..., 2014