ERIKA WASTROM

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
July 30 - August 31, 2016

Opening Reception July 30, 6 - 8pm

Gaa Gallery Wellfleet

Gaa Gallery Wellfleet is pleased to present This Must Be The Place, new paintings by Erika Wastrom. This exhibition will run from July 30 to August 31. Please join us for an opening reception on Saturday July 30, from 6 to 8pm.

Encountering Erika Wastrom’s paintings is both comforting and stimulating in equal measure.  Visual harmony and bright synthetic palettes create a sense of play between the figures and their environment. Wastrom’s paintings contain an effervescence where the subject matter appears ready to burst from the surface.  We see figures in nature, private moments collaged and assembled amidst objects and domiciles, still lives of interior worlds, all indexical evidence of lost moments of experience. Wastrom’s paintings and their multitude of characters offer access to authentic experience, unaffected by the trappings of civilization while also being undeniably built by culture.

The works featured in This Must Be The Place are anything but predictable. In her recent work Wastrom delves into the genre of the still life.  She perceives the still live as a place where the familiar can become foreign, where object and abstraction meet to form allegories of lived experience. Her work seeks for that unnameable part of ourselves that has always remained elusively consistent.   This position of wonder and growth allows a perception of simultaneous innocence and loss where we can only experience the wonder of newness a single time.

Erika Wastrom ( b. 1984 ) lives and works in Barnstable, MA. She received her MFA from Boston University in 2012.  Recent exhibitions include, Summertime, Gaa Gallery (Wellfleet, MA), New Talent, Art STRAND (Provincetown, MA), Asterisk Projects, AAF, (New York, NY). This is Erika’s first solo exhibition with Gaa Gallery.