Erica Eyres at Celine – Artforum International
The ladies posing within the work in Erica Eyres’s exhibition “One other Soiled Room” meet my gaze with a glazed look of their very own. Most seem in some stage of undress in a home setting, mendacity provocatively on a velvet couch or sprawled throughout a mattress. The pictures, gleaned from Eighties-era pornography, are deftly rendered in oils. Three intimately cropped smaller works have the texture of an novice peep present, whereas the bigger items exude a extra glamorous, airbrushed attraction. The fashions all share sure generic options––white pores and skin, pink lipstick, painted nails, faux tits––however the title of every work is a lady’s first title. This mimics a format frequent to British tabloids’ now-defunct “Web page 3,” on which nude pictures have been accompanied by a number of strains of mundane details about the mannequin, each to individuate them and to make them accessible to the “readership.”
The male fantasy of those pinuplike work is undercut by Soiled Dishes with Deflated Girl, 2022, a darkly humorous set of stoneware and resin items that depicts, with disarming realism, a scene of comically bleak desperation: open tins of meals (the bachelor’s food regimen of baked beans, spaghetti hoops, and peas), stained mugs, and full ashtrays, all organized across the ceramic effigy of a collapsed intercourse doll, which shares the artificial attributes and glassy stare of the fashions within the work. The set up encourages a form of public voyeurism in a manner akin to that of Duchamp’s unsettling diorama Étant Donnés, 1968. And whereas the tableau could border on slapstick, the viewing expertise stays faintly embarrassing, tinged as it’s with the unshakable worry of being seen wanting too arduous or for too lengthy.
— Calum Sutherland
