Erin Woodbrey

The Fragment Series

August 30 - September 29, 2019

Opening reception, Friday, August 30, 6 - 9 pm

Gaa Gallery Provincetown

Gaa Gallery Provincetown is pleased to present The Fragment Series, a sculptural installation by Erin Woodbrey, in the Gaa Gallery Provincetown Project Space. Beginning August 30, the exhibition runs through September 29, with an opening reception with the artist on Friday, August 30 from 6-9pm, at 494 Commercial Street, entrance Howland Street.

Erin Woodbrey (b. 1985, Portland, ME) is a New England-based visual artist whose cross-disciplinary works—videos, photographs, prints, and sculpture—are defined by their shared fascination with process and the lineage of learning and objects.  Woodbrey’s Fragments are intellectual explorations of what might be called cycle and residue: as the artist proceeds through the multiple steps of collecting, casting, shaping, and firing found material, deeply felt questions emerge of beginnings, endings, and the transformations that can sometimes eclipse finality with their suggestions of fluidity.

In The Fragment Series, Woodbrey utilizes an accelerated process of transformation, intense with physicality from its point of origin through its high fire evolution. The artist begins with a selection of everyday items, including old t-shirts and backyard branches, and dips them in liquefied porcelain before shaping them around wooden armatures and encasing them in multiple layers of slip. Woodbrey surrenders to the forces of heat and time in the kiln, where fabric and wood burn away, slumping and fusing to create fossil-like objects: organic transformations that simultaneously discard and memorialize their original forms. This two-pronged process of mediated recklessness and informed experiment is the conceptual frame for resultant objects that endure as enchanted, organic reliquaries bearing witness to the quotidian experience.

Erin Woodbrey was a 2018 recipient of a School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellowship, and her work was most recently exhibited at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Gaa Projects Cologne in Germany; and Code Art Fair, Copenhagen, Denmark. Recent solo exhibitions include Leg, Limber, Lumber, Limb, Higgins Gallery Cape Cod Community College, Barnstable, MA; Time Mothers, Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Material Studies, Arena Gallery, Liverpool, UK; and Air of Another Planet, Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, MA. Woodbrey received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014, and her work is included in the public collections of Columbia College, Chicago; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA; and the Fundación ́ace Art Collection, Proyecto’ace, Buenos Aires, Argentina.