Canadian artist Erin Shirreff produces photography, sculpture, and video. Across all media, her work is fundamentally image-based, and her practice is rooted in the studio and in the process: material translations from two to three dimensions, from analog to digital, and vice versa. For her solo exhibition, Table Muse, Shirreff presents a collection of recent works that at first sight seem quite disparate but in fact speak the same language, are of equal monumentality, and share an auratic, durational quality. It is an interrelated body of work that explores the artist’s curiosity about different modes of attention and what happens within the uncertain moments of an aesthetic encounter.

For Shirreff, galleries and museums are some of the rare spaces that allow us to think without a script. With her work, she asks visitors to look, and look again. She explains, “I use art as subject matter because art is an object of contemplation, and in the end, that—contemplation, thinking through looking—is what I’m most curious about.”

Paper sculpture (2024) and Table muse (2025) explore, each in a different way, the tension between surface and spatiality, between parts and the absent whole. Shirreff sources image fragments for these works from art anthologies published in the last 80 years, which she digitizes, enlarges, and reprints onto sheets of aluminum. The thin, now metal, images are cut into shapes and layered into sculptural collages within deep-set frames. The experimentation doesn’t remain on the plane of the image but extends into the physical vitrine-like space of the frame: reproduced and natural shadows, perceived and actual edges combine to shape new forms, new bodies.

Shirreff often constructs makeshift sculptures specifically to photograph, but since 2019, she has produced a series of bronze casts that derive from these ad hoc props. Maquette (A.P. no. 10) (2019) and Burnout (2024), included in the exhibition, both have origins in her earlier photographic work. The particularity of Shirreff’s bronze casts is that they can never be grasped in their entirety, similar to how photographic works are always only a fragment of something larger. Even when viewed repeatedly from all sides, these unyielding objects seem to remain in a state of continuous transformation.

Leaning against the wall are two recent sculptures from Shirreff’s ongoing series, Drop. In these works, heavy sheets of Cor-ten steel are layered one on top of another and are cut through with large, irregular apertures. Here, the negative space, the absence within the rectangles, is central. The silhouettes are precise but vague, and despite the physicality of the raw steel, they recall simple paper cutouts and remnants on a studio floor. These works correspond with a series of new cyanotype photograms from 2025, each uniquely toned various shades of deep red, brown, or navy blue, that depict a similar formal language: curves, edges, layers, and joins that are both exact and informal, specific and undefined.