Born Cape Cod, 1985, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Erin M. Riley’s practice, complete in its’ methodological ‘quasi-antiquity’ (hand-loomed tapestries), exacting execution and purpose is a socio-historical equivalent of Proustian involuntary memory, that arguably extends all the way back to ‘hunter/gather’ divisions of societal gender roles and their near-DNA-encoded presumptions/perceptions. Challenging in execution and subject, Riley’s arresting imagery – meticulously collaged from personal photographs, hard-copy documentation, newspaper clippings and accumulated ephemera – interrogates past and present observations, fantasies, traumas of inner and outer violence, generational acts of domestic abuse and addiction that provoke intimate questions the ‘self’; the sense of autonomy, worth and purpose. Adapting traditional techniques of weft-faced tapestry, Riley hand-dyes her yarns – sourced from obsolete American textile mills – to formulate a colour palette that renders the quality of digitalised/pixelated images. By interweaving both craftmaking and ‘digital’ design to transcribe a narrative of contemporary online-life and socio-political vicissitudes, Riley with diaristic, scorching honesty and seductive openness, conjures a delicate resilience, recognition and validation for her own struggle, and to the shared experience of others.
Erin M. Riley will hold her first solo exhibition at mother’s tankstation, London in January 2025 in collaboration with P.P.O.W, New York. Riley received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2007 and MFA from the Tyler School of Art, 2009. Selected exhibitions include: Designing Motherhood, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX (forthcoming); Reversed Objects, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, (2024); The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, The Brooklyn Museum, NY, (2024); FULL DISCLOSURE, The Plains Art Museum, North Dakota, (2024); The Myth of Normal, MassArt Art Museum, Boston, (2023); Barbarisms, Pequod Co., Mexico City; Portraiture and Figuration in 21st Century Textile Arts, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, Washington D.C, (2023); manifesto of fragility, 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, (2022); Kingdom of the Ill: Second chapter of TECHNO HUMANITIES (2021 – 2023). Riley is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship Grant, 2021 and an American Academy of Arts & Letters Art Purchase Prize, 2021.