ERIN WRIGHT

For Memnosphere, an invented title, Wright expands her ongoing examination of domestic architecture, perception, and surface through an attempt to find the edges of a single word, ‘smell.’ Traversing the field of sensory experience, Wright draws upon three themes: mythology, memory, and research. Across a new suite of paintings, three life-scale kitchenette installations, and a loose-leaf catalogue combining her own texts with reference ephemera, Wright explores this elusive sense, which resists stable representation.

Wright’s paintings retain the rule-bound precision that has defined her practice, rendering tile, wood grain, upholstery, plants, clothing, fruit, insects, skin, and hair, with an exacting clarity that recalls computer-generated architectural visualization and aspirationally casual product photography. Yet, these controlled environments are disrupted by sensory and associative cues: moths hover among flowering cactus; rabbits gathered beneath mid-century furniture; a magnolia cutting perfumes the room near a patterned sofa; a cotton t-shirt hangs on the back of a door.

Constructed on site, Wright’s kitchenette sculptures bridge the ideas of photorealism from her painting practice into the three-dimensional world. Though life-size and complete with upholstered banquettes that serve as gallery seating, they retain propositional qualities of an architectural spec: the cupboards do not open, nor are the sinks plumbed. They sit at the edge of reality, much as Wright’s painted imagery approaches the edge of the canvas while stopping just short of it; a fractional quarter inch border reinforces their foothold in the realm of pure representation.

Wright has also produced a loose-leaf catalogue of original writing, collected excerpts, quotations, recipes, images, and ephemera, available for visitors to peruse in each of the kitchenettes. The catalogue takes inspiration from John Cage’s 1993 Rolywholyover: A Circus exhibition catalogue for MOCA Los Angeles, part of Cage’s ever-changing ‘composition for a museum.’ Many of the short texts offer partial explanatory pathways into the stories behind specific paintings—for example, the medieval practice of wearing amuletic Jet necklaces to repel negative energy; or the mythologized pop science practice of women in Elizabethan England soaking up armpit sweat with sliced apples; or another sheet which transcribes the recipe for Southern Sweet Rice.

In perfumery, fragrances are understood to develop temporally on the skin, moving between the opening and top notes to the heart and eventually to the base. After the brighter, more volatile notes settle, the residual character of the drydown remains, mingling with the wearer’s skin revealing the fragrance’s most individual expression. Although a fragrance’s listed notes can help describe this pyramidal progression, its final effect remains particular to the wearer. Over its three-month run, the exhibition will echo this temporal unfolding, as well as the nonlinear experience of paging through Wright’s loose-leaf catalogue. Paintings will come and go and rotate throughout the duration of the show, allowing the exhibition to shift from one visit to the next, unfixed as memory.

Erin Wright (b. 1990, Memphis, TN, USA) is a painter and professor of architecture at Woodbury University. She studied fine arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 2012) and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles (M. Arch, 2016). She is an adjunct professor of architecture at Woodbury University, Burbank, CA. Her paintings have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions at galleries including Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; MAKI Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA; Field Projects New York, NY; Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Showhouse Jay, Antwerp, BE; Maple Street Construct, Omaha, NE; and Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY. Her work has been featured in Artforum, New American Paintings, Architectural Digest, and The New York Times. Wright’s work is in the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL and the NexAir and Wynn Infiniti corporate collection. Wright lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.