Erin Trefry creates paintings and assemblage with objects that are often personally charged. Recent works, some on canvas, others wall-hanging sculptures, are composed of a variety of materials: everything from ceramics and oil paint to found sartorial objects such as clothing, shoes, and accessories. In “collaborating” (to quote the artist) with these diverse materials, Trefry creates works that feel archival yet futuristic, deconstructed yet reinvented, corporeal and also spiritual, concealing but as a means to unveil greater truths.
In sustaining these polarities, the works assume not so much a perfect (static) balance as a complete (animate) embrace; they connote totality as something endless; they demonstrate impermanence as the only thing that is truly permanent. Even the most minimal pieces—like Inversely from the beginning, which features a tattered red sweatshirt and a ceramic shield adhered to charcoal colored pleather—brim with the distinctly vital and mysterious energy of the life cycle.
In the more painterly works, there is this same circular sensibility—a visual rhythm made harmonious by the presence of both loss and renewal; each time you look at a painting, the same forms can seem either to be coming together or falling apart. It is disorienting in the sense that we become dislodged from our usual binary way of thinking—where this and that are always separate entities—and ourselves embrace the possibility for convergence.
We have no more intimate a connection to this cyclical rhythm than in our own bodies. That so many of Trefry’s works (particularly her more sculptural works) appear bodily—either mask-like or else pelvic—pushes us to consider that relationship. Everyday, we create and we consume. We perpetuate cycles and are ourselves a part of one. Yet at the same time, socially speaking, the body remains a site of countless polarities: it is something that is as often celebrated as censored; something that shows and conceals; something that belongs to each of us, but on which we do not legally exercise absolute control. However while a cycle can seem like an inescapable mechanism of control, what Trefry’s work seems to leave us with instead is its idea of revival—that on the heels of every loss, no matter how traumatic, is an inevitable rebirth.
- Adrian Muoio
Recent Press:
Artforum
LA Weekly
Artforum
Arts Meme
KCRW
Beverly Press
Full Blede
Erin Trefry lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Trefry’s personally charged practice includes paintings, sculptures and assemblage that combine ceramic, inherited objects and clothing to create paintings, totems, mask-like wall pieces and transient structures. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. She has exhibited with galleries and institutions in Southern California including the Harris Gallery at La Verne University, Lowell Ryan Projects, No Gallery, TSA LA, 0-0 LA, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Monte Vista Projects, ODD ARK•LA, Eastside International, Big Pictures Los Angeles, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Trefry’s works have been reviewed and discussed in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, and Art and Cake.