Erin Washington:
I Think We’re Alone Now

September 10 - November 20, 2022

Reception and Artist Talk: September 15, 6 - 8 p.m.
Curator tour with Justin Witte: Thursday September 22, 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Erin Washington is a multi-media artist whose exquisitely detailed paintings and humorous sculptures have made her one of the most distinctive artists working in Chicago today. I Think We’re Alone Now features works conceptualized during the isolation and surreality of the 2020 quarantine.

Erin Washington is a Painter, Drawer, and Installation artist currently living and working in Chicago. Embracing materiality and labor, Washington examines themes of vulnerability and permanence. Using fugitive and symbolic materials (metal-point, nonphoto-blue lead, fluorescent pigments, blackberries, chalk, space blankets, ashes, bone, plaster bandages and saliva), Washington sources imagery from the Sciences, Mythology, and Art History that represent ruptures and failures in the search for meaning and knowledge. Questioning how time structures transitions in ephemera, she creates paintings and installations which unravel time through the performance of their making (ranging from automatic to belabored) often toward their subsequent corporeal degradation. Colors fade or pigments are burned, spontaneous marks are often in tension with considered constructs. The objects emulate the cycles they describe. The artists’ actions and products are in a constant state of flux, highlighting the disharmony between beauty, “truth” and a fundamentally messy universe. However, the relative temporality of the work’s making counters ambivalence; the immediate process and present-ness the work demands eclipses uncertainty... for the moment. 

Washington is a lecturer in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 2011. Notable solo exhibitions have been held at such venues as Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Illinois State University, The Riverside Art Center, Riverside Illinois and Specialist Gallery in Seattle. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at such spaces as Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Julius Caesar, Chicago; and Columbia University in New York.

More Information on Erin here.