Erin M. Riley weaves tapestries from scenes of millennial culture – nudes, mirror selfies, car crashes. The faceless figures rate themselves in front of a bedroom mirror, or spread their legs for a phone screen. Her recent show for Condo 2019 shows a move towards the narrative potential of objects – drug baggies, wads of cash, used condoms, stained underwear. By taking symbols of excess and violence so commonplace online and rehousing them in this ancient medium, Riley encourages renewed critique of online visual culture.
TANK spoke to the artist about how she processes digital culture through her craft and the idea of the disposable.
I’d love to start by asking you a little about the theme for this particular collection of weavings (appearing first at P·P·O·W gallery in New York). Their focus is a little different to previous work, there is more of an emphasis on objects, often quite potent objects.
This series of work is ongoing. I often create work of still lives and car crashes, and the figurative work is an antidote to that more heavy content. I started weaving the car crashes as an investigation of trauma in a literal sense, but I soon started thinking about the cars and how judgment and perception is placed on accidents, and wondering why all bodies aren’t afforded the same considerations.
How do you go about choosing the images that form the basis for your weavings?
As a practice I follow the arrest records for my hometown, and the drug scene is from that website. Those are objects and images from drug arrests, which have affected my family in various ways. I am often worried about seeing my family on those sites, hearing about overdoses, arrests and relapses second hand. I often don’t know where a family member is when they are using as their internet activity ceases, so trolling websites of arrests and deaths is my main way of staying on top of things. The car crashes are often the ones that feel particularly tragic, they all are, but particularly the ones where the driver is drunk or very young. It feels close to home and my mind starts to wonder about the friends, family and community affected by those losses. It’s voyeuristic in a way, but also a practice in empathy and grief.
To choose a particular example, Crimson Landslide 6 shows a women’s underwear stained with menstrual blood. I love this image, partly because the world desperately needs more images of menstruation in the public sphere! But I wanted to know for you, what makes this image jump out amid others?
This image was an amazing submission by a friend. They messaged me saying they had taken a photo of a menstrual leak and if I would want to see it and possibly weave it. I was of course intrigued and they were right. I am pretty obsessed with the reds, the variations in colour and the shine that menstrual fluid exhibits, and I wish more people were accepting of it as a natural part of life and sexuality.
What are the important steps in making a weaving? I can imagine it involves intricate planning. Is there scope for the unexpected?
My work starts with images, then drawings, tracings and figuring out scale. When it’s blown up to the size I will weave it, it’s just a line drawing, so colour and shading becomes a process that is quite organic and fluid. The yarn is prepared, dyed and mixed to create the pallet and the loom is set up with its warp. I try to allow myself especially with the larger works to loosen up and allow for abstraction because there is so much detail that adds up to a larger image.
You often choose images that one might refer to as disposable, a nude selfie taken on a whim perhaps, something that could be deleted off a phone as quickly as it was taken. However, you then treat that image to sustained attention for several weeks. How does your relationship to the original image change in that time?
My initial interest in selfies was how impermanent they were and how often that feeling is tinged with a little emptiness. The selfies I have taken for partners or flirtations are often disappearing, experienced and scrolled on by. It’s an interesting relationship to satiation and appetite, but for my own reflections and nostalgia, one I enjoy – I try to relive the moments of excitement and experience seeing my body through their eyes. But also, I have found the more I get older and deal with the traumas of the past, I have to accept my body for what it is and what it isn’t. These images I weave allow me to marinate and focus on the facts in front of me and develop a more frank relationship to my skin.
One weaving in your show features a red, pock-marked hand, in which one finger forms a threatening monstrous face. You titled the piece Stepbrother. How do you go about naming your artworks, is it an important part of the process or a quick after-thought akin to a mirror selfie or a lewd text?
This piece is a reflection of many things. The hand is a toy from the 1980s, they were called M.U.S.C.L.E. and they were all this pink caucasian flesh colour that I now relate to dildos and sex toys. I came about them when my father was dating a woman and would bring us to her house on his weekends and we would play with her son, he would pour out his toys from his tootsie roll piggy bank and we would explore these odd objects. He was the first boy I had experienced in close proximity and I developed a childlike crush on him. That relationship severed and I never saw him again, but that memory was confusing and shameful. My family has a history of childhood sexual abuse in many generations so my relationship to sexuality was always slightly confused, and as an adult who watches porn I was struck by the new wave of incest porn. I made this piece as a reflection on those fucked up moments that early hormonal surges put you in. The naming of that piece was a way of thinking about the titles in porn videos, but also naming the person who showed me those objects.
I find an ambivalence in these artworks. They seem to revel in a world of x-rated objects, while also presenting a foreboding or grotesque image of excess and violence. Are these tapestries warnings or carnivals?
I have always been a bit cold. My work is a constant piling on of the thoughts and issues that affect me day to day. I think we become immune to imagery that we have no connection to but also naive to how certain elements affect people in very real ways. This work is about things that I am either exploring, trying to understand from an outside perspective or directly affected by. I am not ambivalent about any of it but direct and deliberate.
I’m fascinated by the fact that many people, perhaps the majority of people, who view your work will see it via the internet, on a screen. This return is so interesting: something that began on the internet as a set of pixels is woven into a tapestry, only to return to pixels once again, viewed on Instagram, on your Instagram. What do you make of this process?
Yes! Weaving has a fascinating history relating to the binary and coding. It’s super interesting to have my work seen mostly online. I also enjoy that my work is much more dynamic in person and that people might think they understand it but are missing quite a bit, which is almost the entire concept of internet vs reality. The effort made to see my work in person changes the perception, but it’s almost, almost as good online, which most people accept.
Speaking of Instagram, you posted a close-up of a weave by Ani Albers from her recent show at the Tate Modern. What do you think of her work? Had you seen her work before?
Yes of course. Ani Albers is an icon in weaving. Her work is a mathematical mind-fuck and a not so subtle flex on what is truly possible with the loom if you’re smart or patient enough. I haven’t always been super interested in her work because it is a constant exploration of weaving and pattern, and while I am a weaver I think about the process differently, but I thoroughly respect her work and enjoy the ways she pushed the medium forward.
You’ve been working with online imagery for around a decade now, and in that time, the way we take images of ourselves and the appearance of the internet has changed a lot. I notice a retro quality to some of the objects you feature, cassette tapes, flip phones, CDs. For me these objects are symbolic of the olden-days internet of cyberspace, dirty chatrooms and arcane forums? What do they mean to you?
Yes exactly. The internet has changed so much and I long for the days when it was the place where the weirdos and perverts went. But I am constantly fascinated by the ways the internet has both embraced and shunned sexuality, as well as created havens for people when they had nowhere else to go. I don’t know where I would be if it weren’t for the internet and being able to explore my sexuality in communities that accepted me. And now it allows me to converse with people who disagree with me or find my work offensive, it’s in a constant evolving state. Those objects of the past are for me embedded with sexuality – sexting via flip phones, watching for the light on the side to light up notifying you had a message, cassette tapes with love songs and road trip soundtracks, and CDs where I stored my porn. I try to always be aware of my triggers both positive and negative and look back with fondness on the objects that played a role in the development of my desires and habits.
Erin Riley’s work was on display at The Sunday Painter as part of Condo London 2019.