LOOKING FOR A LOVER
ERIK SCOLLON
EXHIBITION DATES:
JUNE 27 - AUGUST 3, 2024
Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present Looking for a Lover, an exhibition of new work by San Francisco artist Erik Scollon. The exhibition will be on view Thursday June 27th through August 3, 2024.
Looking for a Lover presents a collection of macrame and ceramic works that continues Scollon’s curiosity about the relationships between perception, embodiment and identity. The work in this show plays in the space of the Maurice Merleau-Ponty quote - “We don't just see with our eyes; we see with our whole being, with our body as a perceiving and sensing organ.” The artist invites the viewer to engage with sensate objects, and leans into the queerness of the forms themselves, in all their eccentricities.
Although these tapestries are less sculptural and less object than previous work, the work is still insistently material and process driven. Macrame, while meditative, still carries some loaded connotations - which the artist loves. Often relegated to categories of domestic craft, hobby, the feminine, and new age, its materials are simultaneously used as the standard for paramilitary survivalists. Scollon plays with these dualities to investigate the complicit relationship between things. “I’m attracted to the paracord for its bright colors, but simultaneously uncomfortable with its military/survivalist associations. However, I’m charmed by the other end of accessible DIY uses of paracord such as bracelets and dog leashes.”
The ceramic beads, much like the elusive ceramic blocks that came before them, are made using layers and layers of glaze and fired multiple times, at once concealing, revealing variegated colors. Other porcelain beads and tiles, reminiscent of Scollon’s blue and white tiles and mugs, are subtly yet provocatively covered with decals, little snippets culled from the pages of 90s queer publications. The beads are strung and knotted into intricate, colorful panels that create a field through which simultaneities are played out. Patterns of macrame vibrate alongside patterns of beads. “I try to jam all of these things into knotted panels that are like windows or portals where patterns and ideas are held simultaneously, but can’t be seen all at once. I like the moments when one can feel or sense the composition as much as see it.”
Ultimately, these are not windows into another world, but portals that invite the viewer into a different kind of embodied perception. They invite the viewer to shift between different registers of looking and feeling, being and thinking, intimacy and distance. When Merleau-Ponty wrote “the identity of that which sees and that which it sees appears to be an ingredient of animality,” he wasn’t talking about gay men. But he could have been.
For additional information or sales inquires please email Joey Piziali, joey@romeryounggallery.com
