Loren Erdrich. The echo

As our understanding of space, time, and even life itself advances, we may soon reach a crossroads that transcends the confines of physical existence. These states of being and consciousness will likely echo what is perceived, but with infinite variation and mutability. Loren Erdrich views this possibility with wonder, pursuing her own vision and understanding of this transcendence through painting and the creation of otherworldly ceramic forms. Connection to the world, with all the sorrow and joy it brings, grounds Erdrich’s new works. Her paintings and sculptures seem to shift forward and backward in time all at once, suggesting a repeating loop with no clear beginning or end. With time fluid in her eyes and hands, a lush synchronicity joins painted starscapes and alien worlds with three-dimensional busts, vessels, and totems carefully molded from glazed and fired clay. Flowers sprout from the heads of her sculptures, lifting into the air, and then reappear disembodied, floating among the brightly colored cosmos depicted on her canvases. These joyous imagined galaxies theoretically expand endlessly outward, like our own, but here they have been captured in a flash with dye and paint. Layers of subtly applied colors hint at the depth of these limitless fields of stars and planets, where a motley cast of spirits and figures join together to sit amid the galaxies’ presence and truth. It’s a hopeful scene, but it also offers a realistic nod to today’s crises, with vulnerable, emotional expressions blanketing the group in unison as they take it all in.