Brooklyn-based artist, Erin M. Riley will hold her first solo exhibition at mother’s tankstation London, January 2025.
Co-presented with P.P.O.W, New York for CONDO Look Back at It marks the first exhibition of mother’s tankstation’s co-representation of Riley. The exhibition features a series of new works which present affronting imagery of contemporary life in the unexpected format of woven tapestries.
Challenging in execution and content, the subject matter of each tapestry is painstakingly collaged from personal photographs, hard-copy documentation, newspaper, clippings and accumulated ephemera. Depicted in these complex compositions are fantasies, traumas of inner and outer violence, acts of domestic abuse and addictions. Riley adapts the traditional techniques of weft-faced tapestry, hand-dying her yarns- sourced from obsolete American textile mills- to formulate a colour palette that emulates the quality of pixelised images. Riley’s work interweaves craft making and ‘digital’ design to transcribe a narrative of contemporary life in its tender and violent reality, conjuring a delicate recognition and validation of the artist’s own struggle, and the shared experience of many others.
Riley’s primary medium is closely linked to her artistic purpose. The social and historical context of woven tapestry is inextricably linked with the history of traditional gender roles and women’s labour. In direct juxtaposition to the domestic and ‘feminine’ history of the fabric medium and its post-industrial diminution to ‘craft’, Riley’s uncompromisingly contemporary images draw up subconscious memories of current traumas. Her work deals with abuse, exploitation and self-destruction, alluding to a crisis of worth and value stemming from the de-personalising grip of social media.
The title, Look Back at It, intertwines the artist’s history with all history; the unnamed subject, it, being specific to nothing and everything. Riley’s meticulous tapestries lay the personal, sociological, philosophical and psychological concerns of modern life out before us. The works encourage the floodgates of memory to open as if the viewer is cathartically plugged into the loom they were made with, itself installed in Riley’s Brooklyn studio.
Listings
Look Back at It
In collaboration with P.P.O.W, New York for Condo London 2025
Dates: 18th January until 1st March 2025
mother’s tankstation, London Dressage Court, 48 Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, London E2 6GQ
Further Information: Erin M. Riley | Look Back at It – Mother's Tankstation Limited