Erin M. Riley
Through June 12. P·P·O·W Gallery. 392 Broadway, Manhattan.
Erin M. Riley’s show of handwoven tapestries — largely photo-based — announce her as a major pictorial artist. This exhibition gives full expression to the combination of scorching honesty and seductive openness that distinguishes her work and also to the way she uses the beauty of weaving to both draw us near and soften the blows that her compositions, aided by nearly perfect titles, deliver. Her richly variegated colors and complex, arresting scenes take full advantage of tapestry’s stitch-by-stitch autonomy.
The overall effect is both documentary and diaristic. Some tapestries quietly revisit Riley’s traumatic childhood. Others reveal her attempts at self-care (which sometimes involves webcam sex) as implied by the show’s title — “The Consensual Reality of Healing Fantasies.” Many of the works are incredibly intimate yet restrained: We see Riley’s nude body, lavishly clothed in tattoos, but never her face. We’re in the past with four tapestries that reproduce the stained covers of 1970s pamphlets about domestic abuse, which affected her mother.
A tapestry titled “An Accident” conjures such abuse with a monumental close-up of an injured hand while its title echoes the excuse that battered victims, and batterers alike, typically use to deflect scrutiny. Riley’s teenage composition notebooks appear in “The Rose” and “Beauty Lives Here,” signaling her artistic instincts with their elaborately collaged and decorated covers. One of the most riveting pieces here is “Anxiety,” which depicts the artist’s naked breasts and the scars and scabs of self-mutilation. Beneath them is an opulent tattoo, the word “Treasure” in implicitly “girlish” cursive. Functioning as both a noun and a verb, it admonishes either way: Our life is a gift, value it.