October 7, 2021- November 20, 2021 — Vanitas Anechoic Chamber Erin Washington

October 7, 2021- November 20, 2021 Opening Reception: Thursday, October 7, 5-8PM
Gallery hours: Saturdays, 12pm-3pm and by appointment. Email specialist.gallery@gmail.com or DM us on instagram (@specialist_sea) for inquiries.

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Specialist presents, Vanitas Anechoic** Chamber, works by Chicago-based artist Erin Washington. Riffing on the genre of 15th-17th century Vanitas paintings, Washington’s sculptural objects and wall works play with ideas of transience through the use of fragile materials and a self-referential, intentionally awkward visual vocabulary. Washington’s work in Vanitas Anechoic Chamber forms a loose archaeological survey of the past 18 months spent in quarantine and relative physical and social isolation. Together, collages and cast objects create stream-of-consciousness associations, replete with art historical references, inside jokes and moments of absurdity. Cardboard, plaster bandages, and paint conjoin to forge precarious, impermanent connections, facsimiles of more concrete and enduring relationships. Within the self-contained, constructed world of the Vanitas Anechoic Chamber, Washington’s objects enact an isolated, provisional choir.

**An anechoic chamber (an-echoic meaning "non-reflective, non-echoing, echo-free") is a room designed to completely absorb reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. They are also often isolated from waves entering from their surroundings. Inside a chamber, a person or detector hears direct sounds with no reverberation, in effect simulating being inside an infinitely large room. 

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Embracing materiality and labor, Erin Washington examines themes of vulnerability and permanence. Questioning how time structures transitions in ephemera, she creates mixed-media paintings and drawings which unravel time through the performance of their belabored making, and their subsequent degradation. Using fugitive and symbolic materials (metal-point, non-photo-blue lead, fluorescent pigments, blackberries, chalk, space blankets, ashes, bone, plaster bandages and saliva), Washington sources imagery from the Sciences, Mythology, and Art History that represent ruptures and failures in the search for meaning and truth. Colors fade or pigments are burned: the objects emulate the cycles they describe. The artists’ actions and products are in a constant state of flux, highlighting the disharmony between meaning, beauty, and a fundamentally messy universe. However, the relative temporality of the work’s making counters ambivalence; the immediate process and present-ness the work demands eclipses uncertainty... for the moment. 

Washington is currently a lecturer in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 2011. Notable solo exhibitions have been held at Illinois State University, The Riverside Art Center, Riverside Illinois and Western Exhibitions.  Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at such spaces as Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Julius Caesar, Chicago; and Columbia University in New York. Washington's upcoming exhibition at Cleve Carney Museum of Art in Glen Ellyn, IL is scheduled for Spring 2022.