Autobiography I and II by Erica Eyres
February 23, 2016 to February 28, 2016
Further Than I Can Throw A Stone | January 23rd to April 3rd, 2016
Jeremy Blake, John Bock, Cécile B. Evans, Erica Eyres, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tristan Bera, Lisa Jackson, Karrabing Film Collective, John Knight, Kelly Mark, and Erika Vogt
Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present a two part video series Autobiography I and II by Winnipeg born artist Erica Eyres. She is a multi-disciplinary artist who works between video, drawing and sculpture to represent social and psychological drives, often through the prism of mainstream culture and story-telling. Absurdity and a sense of surrealism underlie much of her artwork, skewing straightforward narrative and resolution.
Erica Eyres’ Autobiography I features a male narrator whose performance reveals an unexpected detachment from the story he presents. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that his script of characters relates to someone other than himself. Autobiography II jumps from dialogue to merely images. In a sequence of tightly framed video shots of the Manitoba Museum’s dioramas, Eyres builds a narrative that follows the course of human evolution, beginning with early forms of underwater life, moving towards dinosaurs, mammals, and eventually humans before devolving into increasingly abstract forms. Both Autobiography I and II seem detached, almost devoid of emotion. In the former, the narrator reads in a monotone voice and in the second, figures in the dioramas are rendered nearly featureless, with the cuts between frames uniform and somewhat mundane. These autobiographies have a distancing affect limiting the viewer’s empathic attachment instead of engaging it. There is a process of estrangement, complicating the viewer’s understanding of the author’s subjective truth, fighting with the works’ title and the possibility of achieving such a thing as an ‘autobiography’.
Autobiography I and II is one of ten art videos and short films presented as part of Further Than I Can Throw A Stone. Over the duration of the exhibition, a selection of works by a diverse and international group of artist is presented sequentially as stand alone artworks, each projected for one week at a time. They are joined through medium and an interplay of performance and biography.
Erica Eyres (born in Winnipeg, Canada 1980) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Eyres graduated with a MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2004. She has had solo exhibitions at The Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow and the Kunsthaus, Erfurt, with selected group exhibitions including PS1, New York, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, The Akureyri Art Museum, Akureyri, Iceland, and The Collective, Edinburgh. Her work is in international collections including The Rubell Family Collection, Miami and The David Roberts Collection, London.
On Tuesday, March 1st, Plug In ICA will launch John Bock’s Bauchhöhle bauchen.
Cécile B. Evans, Trilogy (January 22 – 31) • Kelly Mark, 108 Leyton Ave (February 1 – 7) • Lisa Jackson, SAVAGE (February 8 – 14) • Erika Vogt, Darker Imposter (February 15 – 21) • Erica Eyres, Autobiography I and II (February 22 – 28) • John Bock, Bauchhöhle bauchen(February 29 – March 6) • Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tristan Bera, Belle comme le jour(March 7 – 13) • Karrabing Film Collective, Windjarrameru, the Stealing C*nt$ (March 14 – 20) • John Knight, MacGuffin 8 -2975 (March 21 – 27) • Jeremy Blake, Winchester (March 28 to April 3).
Plug In ICA gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council and Winnipeg Arts Council. We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of our 2016 and 2017 program, and we extend gratitude to The Winnipeg Foundation and all our generous donors, valued members and dedicated volunteers.
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For media inquiries please contact: Janique Vigier at janique@plugin.org or by phone at (204) 942-1043 ext. 27