Erin M. Riley
P·P·O·W is pleased to present Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours, Erin M. Riley’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. In a new body of meticulously crafted and powerfully vulnerable large-scale weavings, domestic scenes congeal and dissolve amidst family photos, car crashes, iPhone selfies, and newspaper clippings. Collaging moments from her past and present, Riley intersperses images of herself with memories of her childhood home before it was lost in a storm of separation, alleged affairs, and foreclosure. Throughout these works, Riley investigates the forces that shaped her life and the splintering of personal identity, dissecting each layer to reveal the secrets within.
Riley’s innovative approach to fiber obscures the binary opposition between fine art and craft, shifting the discourse around the medium by merging complex, often sensitive, subject matter from the digital and physical realms. Using hand-dyed wool and cotton yarns sourced from shuttered textile mills, Riley executes her hand-woven tapestries using a thoroughly nuanced and personalized color palette. With this technique, the Brooklyn-based weaver carefully renders the pixelated effect of screenshots and Photo Booth selfies interlaced with moments extracted from old family photographs or culled from memory.
In Somebody Cares, 2025, the artist’s lingerie-clad body reclines across an asphalt highway while a totaled car, discarded beer bottle, and illuminated window emblazoned with the letters “S.O.S.” suggest preceding, or impending, disaster. Another work, You Broke, 2025, integrates a text overlay from a scene in Sex and the City, in which Carrie’s boyfriend, Aidan, exclaims “you broke my heart!” referring to an affair that leads her back to an old relationship. Through these montaged environments, Riley examines the parallels between her childhood and the illicit relationships she developed in adulthood, writing, “As a kid who was passed back and forth amidst child support battles it always felt like I was torn between alliances, much like the feeling of following the heart in matters that have ethical grey areas.” Learning to fragment herself when moving through spaces so as not to reveal too much, Riley’s works demonstrate the turmoil that ensues when allegiances are divided.
Forest, 2025, the largest work in the exhibition, features the artist’s body digitally repeated, sequenced, and then hand-woven at a monumental scale. An image of the desolate forest behind Riley’s parents’ house hovers in the composition as a reminder of her origins, while a length of birthday streamers winds across a banister in the foreground. Created as the artist approaches her 40th birthday, the works encapsulate a retrospective view of her life thus far. Hundreds of feet of hand-woven birthday streamers form a throughline for the entire exhibition, extending her tapestries into the three-dimensional space of the gallery while paying homage to the trials she has overcome and her survival.
Erin M. Riley (b. 1985) received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco, CA; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Gana Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea; kaufmann repetto, New York, NY, and Milan, Italy; Timothy Taylor, London, UK; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; among others. Riley is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship Grant, 2021, and an American Academy of Arts & Letters Art Purchase Prize, 2021, and has completed residencies at MacDowell Colony, NH, and the Museum of Art and Design, NY. Her work was recently featured in 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; manifesto of fragility, the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France; and Kingdom of the Ill, Museion, Bolzano, Italy. Recent solo exhibitions include The Invisible Third, UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; watering false flowers, cadet capela, Paris, France; and Look Back at It, mother’s tankstation, London, UK.
lntimate and revelatory, Riley's narrative textiles present her parables of self within densely layered social contexts and family histories as a disquieting investigation of identity and habit.
The artists will discuss the subject matter explored in Riley's exhibition, and the broader themes shared across both artist's practices.
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.
As she approached her fortieth year, fiber artist Erin M. Riley found herself ruminating on memories of childhood and the meaning of home.
Timed with her 40th birthday, the artist has repurposed her personal archives into a new set of formidable tapestries.
Some shows thrill, some surprise, some confuse — bless them all.
Throughout these works, Riley investigates the forces that shaped her life and the splintering of personal identity, dissecting each layer to reveal the secrets within.
In September, the New York-based creative will unveil her latest and largest weavings to date in a solo exhibition at New York’s P·P·O·W gallery