Exhibition · Anat Ebgi · Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES—Anat Ebgi is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist and architect Erin Wright. The exhibition, entitled Memnosphere, is on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from September 19 through January 16. An opening reception will be held with the artist on Saturday, September 19, 6-8 pm. For Memnosphere, an invented title, Wright expands her ongoing examination of domestic architecture, perception, and surface through an attempt to find the edges of a single word, ‘smell.’ Traversing the field of sensory experience, Wright draws upon three themes: mythology, memory, and research. Across a new suite of paintings, three life-scale kitchenette installations, and a loose-leaf catalogue combining her own texts with reference ephemera, Wright explores this elusive sense, which resists stable representation. Wright’s paintings retain the rule-bound precision that has defined her practice, rendering tile, wood grain, upholstery, plants, clothing, fruit, insects, skin, and hair, with an exacting clarity that recalls computer-generated architectural visualization and aspirationally casual product photography. Yet, these controlled environments are disrupted by sensory and associative cues: moths hover among flowering cactus; rabbits gathered beneath mid-century furniture; a magnolia cutting perfumes the room near a patterned sofa; a cotton t-shirt hangs on the back of a door. Constructed on site, Wright’s kitchenette sculptures bridge the ideas of photorealism from her painting practice into the three-dimensional world. Though life-size and complete with upholstered banquettes that serve as gallery seating, they retain propositional qualities of an architectural spec: the cupboards do not open, nor are the sinks plumbed. They sit at the edge of reality, much as Wright’s painted imagery approaches the edge of the canvas while stopping just short of it; a fractional quarter inch border reinforces their foothold in the realm of pure…