If you think about the last sculpture you’ve seen, it was likely on your phone, on TV, or in a book. When representing a 3D object in 2D, what gets lost in translation? Is it the same artwork, or perhaps something different?
Erin Shirreff started as a sculptor, but she uses photography to explore the transformative space between mediums and dimensions. Much of her work pieces together photos of different abstract sculptures to create slightly incongruous new forms. As a result, her work prompts viewers to rethink about the images that they view the world through.
Starting May 30, over 40 recent works of collage, photography, sculpture and video by Shirreff are being shown at the Milwaukee Art Museum in a new exhibition titled “Permanent Drafts”. It’s the Canadian artist’s most comprehensive exhibition in a decade, and it includes site-specific installations and at least one new acquisition by the museum.
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“While photographs increasingly lose trust as conveyors of knowledge, Erin Shirreff’s work, which dwells in the place between image and object, has only become more relevant,” said MAM’s photography and media arts curator Kristen Gaylord in a press release. “I have long admired her thoughtful approach to the generative potential of representation, and it has been a joy to collaborate with her in bringing this wide-ranging presentation of her recent work to Milwaukee.”
Walking down the staircase to MAM’s Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts, viewers are greeted by Inside times (2020), a large abstract work that’s seemingly a painting but actually a collage of cyanotypes – an early form of photography. Several other works play with perception. One work purchased by the museum, titled Paper sculpture (2024), comprises aluminum prints pulled from book pages of four materials – plaster, stone, metal and wood. There’s at least one point of connection from one fragment to the other to create an understandable form, but other edges end abruptly and give the form a sense of impossibility.
Also on display are a few sculptures based on Shirreff’s assemblages, and they represent attempts at translating shapes back into 3D. These sculptures are smaller than most of the surrounding assemblages, which in turn encourage people to consider the angles from which they view the sculptures. Matching in size, however, is Drop (2025), a layered installation of a dozen sheet-metal shapes drawn from three of Shirreff’s sculptures. For this and other works, she spent time meticulously placing the shapes in compositions for the exhibition.
The Milwaukee Art Museum says Shirreff’s art “rewards in-person engagement and slow, close looking.” At least one museum label suggests that viewers imagine what the original sculptures looked like before Shirreff reconfigured them. Conceptually, “Permanent Drafts” explores similar themes about images to the museum’s recent Robert Longo exhibition.
The new Erin Shirreff exhibition “continues the museum’s exploration into the expansive world of photography, beyond the traditional print to the medium’s larger role in art and society,” said chief of curatorial affairs Elizabeth Siegel.
“Permanent Drafts” runs through Aug. 31.
