The loom may be the most domestic of instruments, but in the hands of Erin M. Riley, it becomes a catalyst for chaos. Her tapestries recall crime scenes, vintage family photographs, OnlyFans accounts. Scenes from suburbia are overlaid with collaged fragments, text, and internet toolbars. The medium of weaving — ancient, laborious — feels apt for Riley’s investigative project. This punishing process, thread by thread, inch by inch, keeps luridness from sinking into banality. What emerges isn’t nostalgia but a luminous confrontation with the past.
Selfies recur: Riley in bedrooms, in black underwear, tattooed skin. Innocent and provocative at once, these images expose how she sees herself as well as how others might. Childhood photos are also here, bearing the red time stamp from the 1990s and family members whose faces have been blotted out. A father holds her yet already seems absent. Birthday parties read as both ordinary snapshots and horror films. “I want to face my vulnerability, to share it,” she told an interviewer in 2024. Her tapestries have the intimacy of Sylvia Plath poems crossed with forensic police reports.
Now 40 years old, she is at her peak. Her new show at P·P·O·W, “Life Looks Like a House for a Few Hours,” is her best yet, dreamy and ominous. The private turns public, the home threadbare. Are these memories and reconstructions? We’re invited into her working-class Massachusetts house. “As a kid who was passed back and forth amidst child support battles,” she says in the gallery’s promotional materials, “it always felt like I was torn between alliances — much like following the heart in matters that have ethical gray areas.” The tapestries mimic that fragmentation, each panel a stitched-together reality.
They also enlarge her experiences. One work stretches nine by 12 feet; others climb past eight. This is vengeful ambition. Built from wool and cotton remnants of shuttered mills and dyed by hand, her pieces accrete by knots, each like a scar. They tell of survival, anger, confession — stories that painting or photography might only diminish.
You Broke dominates the show. A car wreck anchors the composition, cliché sharpened into tragedy. A teddy bear lies nearby. The words “You broke my heart!” in a corner. A stack of letters labeled “Mother’s Love.” A Polaroid of Riley as an infant on her father’s lap. A red highway sign commands, “Wrong Way Go Back.” Flowers by the roadside complete the shrine. And then, incongruously, a cropped photo of Riley in lingerie, inserted like an intrusive ad. Adult betrayals and childhood traumas collide until they echo against one another with unnerving force.
In Somebody Cares, Riley’s faceless body dominates, clad in black underwear. The pose recalls the odalisque, though the tone is godlike detachment, presiding over a catastrophic wreck. Words intrude: “Somebody cares,” “Good bye,” “Road.” Beer bottles litter the foreground, blunt emblems of drunk driving. From one side, a disembodied apartment window glows with “S.O.S.” The imagery veers toward the overwrought. It is disjointed, literal, unsettlingly grand.
If medieval tapestries stitched dynastic history, Riley is recording her own. Compare her to Marian Henel, the Polish outsider confined to a psychiatric hospital for nearly 30 years beginning in 1966, who knotted vast carpets teeming with satyrs, nude women, priests with erections. His infernal fantasies connect to Riley’s haunted autobiographies, her family photos rewoven into monumental weavings. Riley’s work also recalls Faith Ringgold, whose story quilts fused personal history with collective struggle. Ringgold filled hers with protest and celebration; Riley charges hers with private reckoning.
Riley has called her work “pixelated screenshots slowed down by the loom.” In Road Reverberations, she pushes this idea to its limit. An empty suburban road is jammed with sentences: the last things an abuser said to the abused, things like “I’m sorry you feel that way, please forgive me, it hurts me too.” Not tender words but the familiar script of abuse, manipulations meant to bind and silence. Woven into wool, they take on terrible permanence.