ABOUT / CV

b.1987

Los Angeles, CA

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Currently works and lives in Los Angeles

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As a painter, Erica is interested in making the ancient contemporary and turning the present into artifact. Sculptural paintings are the focus of her most current body of work. She (figuratively) excavates ancient “female” bodies, bringing them into the light of the present day, reexamining and interpreting them through a contemporary feminist lens. The walls of ancient structures are a major source of inspiration for Erica, as she is captivated by their elusive layers, hidden frescoes, rust, peeling paint, graffiti -- the imprints of different cultures and eras on the same surface. Gestures and symbols of women’s power often emerge as pentimenti in her paintings. Her underlying sense of being at the precipice of ecological and societal collapse motivates her sculptural paintings’ existence as make-believe future artifacts.  She asks herself: upon what strange vestiges will future archaeologists happen when they excavate us in a thousand years? The rough and uneven textures of burlap, reclaimed wood and reclaimed, recycled foam turf underlayment serve as Erica’s substrates for her experimentation with raw pigments & natural dyes, natural resins, charcoal, and wax.

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Zach Baker, curator at Reisig & Taylor Contemporary, described Erica's work, particularly that in the show Skins, Holes, and Hovels as follows:

"Erica Everage’s process is driven by mark-making, an interest in how a transformative sequence is recorded, and oriented around specific materials. Everage works with color, texture, and structure while evolving ancient or abandoned imagery in contemporary forms. Folding the past into the present, she finds blurry connections between history and memory, with attention to perennial—though perhaps forgotten—symbols that determine relations between gendered modes of embodiment and (recognizable) categories of identity. In particular, many of the figures from which she works in abstraction are ancient feminine Western deities or icons—such as the Sheela na gig—once placed above doors and entrances as guardians of liminal spaces. At the same time, her use of interstitial materials, such as burlap and artificial turf sub-base, suggests that this engagement with voids via voided, discarded, or in-between substances begins on the level of the substrates of her work."

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