The Mourning After, 2003

The Mourning After, an exhibition of process based paintings and drawings by Erika Knerr opens Thursday, April 3 at Lance Fung Gallery. This is the third New York solo exhibition for Knerr, who has been showing with the gallery since 1998. The Mourning After includes six paintings that visualize the emotions tied to six stages of mourning and recovery: Blinding Shock, Utopian Anger, Grief’s Domain, Coping Dance, Memory’s Touch and Duration’s Wisdom. Also shown are the large drawings on paper and six square wooden floor panels made to develop the image for each stage of mourning. The forms create a visual flow through the grieving process and suggest that in the end the stages merge into each other, not having a clear beginning and end.

The paintings and drawings of The Mourning After are a brave attempt to explore the powerful emotional reconnaissance enveloping the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. They were made in New York City surrounded with the inevitable threat of war and terror. Blinding Shock is almost completely black. Duration’s Wisdom was made on the floor, by using a long paintbrush, dipping it in black ink, placing it on the canvas and walking around the painting, creating a long circular, continuous line. Redipping the brush whenever needed, “I simply walked as long as I could around and around the canvas until I could walk no longer.”

The exhibition explores pure emotion with the materiality of painting through personal experience. The paintings are black, white and gray ink and pigment, in order to focus on an internal image that is beneath the surface. A place that is raw and basic that would be made insignificant with color. The images reference the chest cavity, the place in the body where strong emotion lies. The paintings aim to document the movement of feeling through the body. The result approaches modernist techniques reminiscent of abstract expressionism, yet are about something very different. Rather than being about paint, or simply the end of painting, they are infused with an emotive touch. The work alludes to the dialogue with the “Death of Painting”, debated in the 1980s, which is being reexamined again today.

Marking Time, June 2000

Marking Time interpreted the universal theme of longing for a child, and ritual marking of time and material. Erika Knerr counters personal states of emptiness, desire and longing with anticipation, excitement and an awareness of vast possibility.

For this exhibit the artist sews individual paintings together with antique quilting squares from a friendship quilt made in 1920’s Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Adapting an Amish bars pattern, she joins the elements to create a 1100 square foot cloth structure. The “quilt” is suspended from the ceiling, creating a womb like environment. The four corners of the quilt are mounted to the ceiling using pulleys, allowing the natural weight and life of the quilt to take on the form of a bellied stomach. The giant structure takes on a dynamic quality as the artist continually reshapes it using the tension of the pulleys. Depending on the time of day or quality of natural light the quilt may hover close to the ceiling while at other times it is lowered causing the viewer to crouch while crossing the empty gallery space.

As Joshua Selman mentions in his review of Marking Time for New York Arts Magazine, “In Marking Time the role of Motherhood is re-examined Erika Knerr speaks to the enormous split experienced between the role of producer, the role of Mother and her longing to sew them back into one and the same.” While the exhibition is beautiful and strong, a sense of urgency lingers as her own desires and pressures are positioned secondary to the mother-line.

Absorption, 1998

Absorption included a wall drawing that evolved throughout the run of the show made with four, nine foot handmade drawing tools in a process based installation that explores the materiality of painting.

Drawing Tool is a heavy canvas square folded into a drawing stick and bound with cotton clothesline. The feeling of constraint and release is apparent in these pieces; bound energy holding the potential for creation. This modest tool resonates as a prototype for the large rotaing tools installed in the exhibit.

Abidjan Dream Tools, explores a powerful dream experience the artist had while working in West Africa. It consists of four feather pillows in four drawers placed on the floor. Nine foot wooden poles covered with muslin and bound with cotton clothesline rope rest on the pillow and lean against a nine foot high narrow canvas that sits in the drawer on stretched real wax fabric printed in Cote d’Ivoire.

In Circle of Boxes various objects and earth pigments brought back from Ms. Knerr’s travels and arranged in drawers function as travel diaries. When the drawers are opened a view opens to remains of pigment absorbed canvas resting in a ceramic bowl at the bottom of the structure.

Blue is an objective result of the absorbtion process posing as painting. The chance result approaches labored crystalline techniques reminiscent of rule-based abstract cubism.

Hung Box, exists as two canvases, one a light sand painting the other dark.