Erin E. Castellan
Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present What Came First, the inaugural exhibition in our new gallery space at 22 London Rd, opening March 8th, 2024. Including work in a variety of media from our roster of represented artists, we are delighted to also include work from several artists showing with us for the first time. An opening reception will be held Friday March 8 from 6-8PM.
The exhibition will include work by: Brandon Boan, Eric William Carroll, Erin E. Castellan, Orly Cogan, Margaret Curtis, Erika Diamond, Bryan Graf, Sandi Haber Fifield, James Henkel, Laura Letinsky, Phillip Maisel, Rachel Meginnes, Ben Nixon, Randy Shull, David B. Smith, Zander Stefani, Kirsten Stolle, Carly Owens Weiss, & Luke Whitlatch.
The show is centered around the idea of “layers,” both materially and conceptually. The title – a nod to the exhibitions’s premise and to this new iteration of our gallery’s program – also references the process of art making itself, as each artist must choose a starting point. Media will include photography, collage, textile, ceramics, and painting, demonstrating an array of techniques – layering paint with everyday objects, adding hand interventions on appropriated imagery, meticulously hand embroidering beads into soft sculpture, & sewing clothing using lenticular fabric.
Sandi Haber Fifield incorporates photography, collage, and hand made elements in her work, exposing the act of perception itself, while images of the natural world serve as grounding points, as seen in the work included here from the series Lineations. Star Field (2020) is from Eric William Carroll’s series Standard Stars which examines a photographic archive of the Universe and its decay as a result of human error. Drawn from the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, the images document the history of photographing the sky from the late 1800’s until the end of the 20th century on a now obsolete medium—glass plate negatives.
Along with these material interpretations of the theme of layers, works which reveal “what lies beneath” push the exhibition conceptually. Margaret Curtis’ work looks at decaying archetypes; her painting Collapse (2022) shows a dilapidated billboard of the post-war feminine ideal, portrayed as the Lichtenstein-esque comic book heroin, perhaps exposing the façade of perfection. Carly Owens Weiss’ piece The Bearer (2023) is a hand-embroidered soft sculpture of a piece of toast with an egg. It serves as a humorous interpretation of the shows title, while exploring more complex ideas of the dualities present within food, which can be nurturing or destructive, pleasant or disgusting, and quickly transform from savory to rot.
