Images courtesy of Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, photos by Wes Magyar, 2022
Erica Green’s site-conscious fiber installations explore the endless process of repairing and rebuilding oneself. Her practice calls to mind a kind of marathon or endurance-based approach to working in that each strip of fabric, knot, and tie is a paced passage of time. While a knot typically represents a stopping point, Green’s practice utilizes the knot as a symbolic gesture for mending and continuation. The artist’s work is shaped by hardship and by tensions between elements/forces that are both strong and fragile, messy and disciplined, heavy and light. Despite these dueling oppositions, each installation evokes comfort and pause amid the complexities of time and healing.
This exhibition demonstrates Green’s ability to thoughtfully “read” architecture and create work that simultaneously responds to and feels at home within a space. The artist recognizes certain areas where her work can live, carving out intentional sites for intervention and activation. Green’s latest work, Once They Were Red, rests in the window cut-outs of the gallery. Each opening holds an accumulation of knotted white felt held together by handcrafted pins, which progress in color and saturation in a gradient of deep red to white. She explores this concept further by introducing pins, which are used in mending, sewing, marking, and holding things together. Although tiny and at times subtle, the pins are substantial, monumental marks steeped in metaphor for healing and the passage of time.
Green’s attention to space is mirrored in her ability to create a particular atmosphere. The entrance to the gallery is coated in a dark navy hue, which typically conveys a kind of denseness or sorrow. She counters that intensity by hanging white “chandeliers” within a windowless room. Green leans into this tension between light and dark. She invites viewers to walk around the forest of simulated light and find balance within the dark space. Collectively, the works elicit a sense of comfort and moments of reflection amid the complex process of how the simple knots accumulate, blend, and harmonize among their monochromatic counterparts, becoming impossible to distinguish.
-Pamela Meadows, BMoCA Curator
The Boulder Creative Collective Gallery
Boulder, CO, 2021
photography by Wes Magyar
Time had a different weight during the last year. On occasion, it was heavier and slower, even cautious. Every now and again time almost stood still. Other times, it felt frenetic, chaotic, and complex, rendering it almost impossible to comprehend what happened just seconds before. Most moments carried the baggage of foreboding and uncertainty. The Weighting Room explores these dynamics, which were the human experience of a pandemic.
The 'Weighting Room' was created during the hours and days and weeks that I spent nearly entirely at my home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The large installations, 'California King' and 'Weighting,' are anchored on familiar domestic objects. 'California King' centers on a bed -- a familiar yet intimate resting place critical to resetting and repairing from the days' knawing uncertainty. The mattress is covered by a heavy safety blanket of knotted felt and fibers, a metaphor for the deep human need to find security. In another work, 'Weighting', a large chandelier reminds us of spaces where we once gathered, but no longer could because of the pandemic. The knots also symbolize the mending and reparing process that characterizes human life in all of its phases, but was particularly pronounced during the lockdowns. They are a visual record of healing during dark times. Finally, I added commonplace sounds -- birds chirping from an open window, a single chair moving on a floor, etc. -- to expand and underscore the sense of being alone and at home, waiting and trying to hold up the weight of the waiting.
Audio Collage for Weighting Room Exhibit, 5 min 55 seconds, 2021
'Weighting', detail image, knotted fibers on wood, site specific installation, 48 x 48 x 96 in, 2021
The Embers, knotted fiber and felt, 2020
Site specific installation for the Gallery of Contemporary Art
Colorado Springs, CO, 2020
Photography by Stellar Propeller Studio
When creating an installation, I begin with the architecture of the space. What struck me about the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs was the reflective glass doors and the ink black tile floor that ring the center chandelier space. I quickly sensed how these features could hold "The Embers." The mended white fibers cascade from the ceiling and surround the thick, dark strips of felt that have stacked up on the tile floor. If you look closely, I believe you can see the fibers glow as they reflect off the surrounding surfaces. In some sense, they are both falling and floating.
Site specific installtions for The Art Base, Basalt, CO
2020
Photography by Draper White
A Moment, Please, Detail, Knotted felt and fibers
Statement for the exhibition:
Using simple fibers, the exhibition, "A Moment, Please" at The Art Base attempts to celebrate the small and big moments. In these works, I focus on a single moment in a sea of others. Highlighting, celebrating, and remembering them as they were or as I recall them to be. As a singular moment in a timeline they can be big, messy, dark, small and/or bright moments. But in the sea of other moments, it's a space to remember that particular moment in time.
In my work, time is represented by obsessively binding knots over and over again. Time builds and expands and the work asks the viewer to take a step back and look for "A Moment, Please."
A Moment, Please, Knotted felt and fibers
A Moment, Please, detail, Knotted felt and fibers
Installation view
A Short Pause, Knotted fibers
A Moment, Please, Knotted felt and fibers
Installation view
Ties, Knotted fibers and felt
Ties, detail, knotted fibers and felt
Weighted Moments, detail, knotted fiber
Weighted Moments, knotted fibers
Weighted Moments, detail, knotted fibers
site specific installation at the AKA Gallery, Boulder ,CO, 2019
knotted fibers on wood
photography by Wes Magyar
When conceiving ideas for an installation, I begin with the architecture of the space. At the AKA gallery, the long black beams and lofted ceiling that preside over the space inspired me to create “Passages” — a world where viewers may feel alone and moments later connected to others.
"Passages" is an interactive installation that aims to engage viewers. Here, I want viewers to be participants on their own journey through one of life’s many mazes. This maze is comprised of billowing, knotted fibers, which allow the walls to change from solid to transparent in an instant.
As with life, each participant will come away with a different experience. Some may travel the maze all on their own. Others may stumble upon a new experience with a friend or stranger. All the while, “Passages” imbues the space with the sense of a home, a womb, or a cocoon.
At the end of the maze, I hope participants will memorialize their own passage by leaving their mark on a wall of untouched fiber. Some may mend. Others may knot or braid or tear. And some may simply reshuffle a few fibers. In the end, there will be a visual record of the collective experience for us to celebrate.
Site responsive installation for the front entrance of The Lincoln Center, Fort Collins, CO, 2019
Knotted fiber on partitian wall
A site responsive Installation for The Arvada Center for the Arts, Arvada, CO, 2019, Director’s Award Winner
Photos provided by The Arvada Center for the Arts
Photography by Wes Magyar
Site specific installation, RULE Gallery, Denver, CO, 2018
Knotted fibers and wood
102 x 100 x 62 in
Images coutesy of RULE gallery, Photography by Wes Magyar
Statement:
Using simple fibers, "Moments Held" is a visual accumulation of time. Three wooden frames hang from the ceiling of the gallery. White knotted or ‘Mended ‘ fibers fill the wooden frames like a timeline waiting to be investigated.
Push. Pull. Stop. Go. Back. Forth. Time amasses and blends, and moments are hard to distinguish. This ongoing work shows how time can be both strong and fragile, messy yet organized. I am interested in how binding knots creates a sense of time building on itself. Tearing. Mending. Learning. Growing. Moving on.
site specific installation , ReCreative Denver, CO, 2018
knotted fibers on stairwell
Photography by Wes Magyar
The long knotted strings of fiber undulate, keeping rhythm with the footsteps. The work sways subtly in tune with the viewers who drift in, out and above it. As viewers scale up and down the steps and in and out of the semi secluded space below, their presence is recorded for a moment in the drifting fibers. An experience that is personal, public and always fleeting.