ERIN WOODBREY

TIME MOTHERS

September 1 - October 7, 2017

Opening Reception September 1, 6 - 9pm

Gaa Gallery Provincetown

Time Mothers, from artist Erin Woodbrey, is the culmination of a cross-disciplinary practice comprised of photography, sculpture, prints, and video. Woodbrey’s work is presented, piece by piece, as an origin-based examination of fabricated and naturally occurring units of space and time. Her gaze, wide in scope and complex in curiosities, is trained on the interrelated qualities of process, materials, nature, and architecture, asking essential questions about how the functions of objects and nature inform, mirror, and tend to the human condition. Woodbrey’s work inquires about the maternal functions of made objects and the natural world: How does architecture support the body? How does physical earth frame human experience? 

The artist insists on elemental proximity—the body astride architecture, the foot atop earth—and rigorously directed observation. As we encounter Woodbrey’s visions, made manifest in her large-scale photographs, minimalist sculpture, and original writings, we find a constellation of reversals and suggestions. Woodbrey’s work pulses with a seer-like restraint, making space for the transformation of objects from static elements to agents of care and living temples of history.  

The artist’s meditative style is modeled to quiet and distill.  Pairing a slurry of porcelain and clothing-based textiles that carry a history of nearness to the body- wool blankets, well-worn shirts and bathrobes, gloves, and socks, Woodbrey’s ceramic sculpture studies are relics of human movement and function. Her process-based photographs of art objects and nature, and her reflexive written work all bear the marks of simultaneous precision and urgency. The artist swaps answers for the enduring value found in thoughtful observation; Time Mothers is an elegant, multi-directional exhibition, one that utilizes a range of contemporary approaches to address the temporal qualities of nature and creation. 

Erin Woodbrey (b. 1985, Portland, ME) is a New England-based visual artist whose body of cross-disciplinary work—videos, photographs, prints, and sculpture—utilizes repetition, silence, and the physical isolation of organic and static elements to parse the linked qualities of quotidian experience. Woodbrey’s recent solo exhibitions include Material Studies, Arena Gallery, Liverpool, United Kingdom; Air of Another Planet, Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, MA; and Undercoat, Gallery 10, Truro, MA. Group exhibitions include, The Grass is Green, Gaa Gallery, Cologne, Germany; Beneath Metropolis, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Poetics of the Landscape, Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA; New Prints New Narratives, International Print Center, New York, NY; Video Trail Mix, Tritriangle, Chicago, IL; and For Love, Not Money, Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia. 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. She is the recent recipient of the 2018 School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University Traveling Fellowship and a residency fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center.