June 27 – July 26, 2007

Curated by Homeira Goldstein, Chairman of the Board of ARTS Manhattan, Torsos and Gestures is the first solo show of Suzanne Erickson’s work.  She recently graduated from Claremont University with an MFA degree.

Suzanne Erickson work is connected to female experience and drama.  It is a decoding of her life. It is also a practice of disclosure.   She exposes her life’s events and reveals some of her humiliations, failures, hopes and successes. She wishes to depict female hypersensitivity, emotionality, obsession and fear.  She is also interested in how women act out their theatrical behavior, showing who they are, how they see themselves especially in relation to gender, which can be reoccurring themes.

Dealing with female forms and their emotional state of being, her work is comprised of TWO and THREE dimensional paintings.   Erickson uses the process of documentation in creating her work.  Depicting the emotional state, she photographs the position and then paints from the photograph.

Erickson’s oversized female sculptures gesticulate different psychological states.  Intricate as the wire winds its way through and across these female torsos, the forms are awkward and uncomfortable insinuating another world in which they live, a space of chaos and emotional conflict.  They are about gesture as a matter of psychological expression, so much that the women have vanished and only their gestures have remained.  Nostalgic in their appearance as the pulling of the past drapery, these sculptures embark on now a contemporary female form.  These female forms primarily in shades of grey, black, brown, white and red emote different emotional states like empty vacuums they stand, sit in a scale that is difficult to ignore.