ABOUT / CV

b.1987

Los Angeles, CA

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Currently works and lives in Los Angeles

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Erica is interested in making the ancient contemporary, and sometimes turning the present into artifact. She (figuratively) excavates ancient “female” bodies, bringing them into the light of the present day, reexamining them, interpreting them against the backdrop of today’s misogyny and gender discrimination. Symbols of women’s power, and perhaps a feminist iconography, emerge as pentimenti in her paintings. An underlying sense of being at the precipice of ecological, and therefore societal, collapse motivates her more sculptural paintings’ existence as make believe future artifacts. Upon what strange vestiges will future archaeologists happen when they excavate us in a thousand years? What do we seem to be worshipping? What of our trash will appear as treasure?

The rough and uneven textures of burlap, reclaimed wood, tree sap resin, and reclaimed recycled foam underlayment serve as Erica’s substrates, while she conjures her colors and gestures out of a myriad of mediums, including but not limited to raw pigments & natural dyes, acrylic, cyanotype fluid, watercolor, oil and oil stuck. Experimentation with material is central Erica’s practice.

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Zach Baker, curator at Reisig & Taylor Contemporary, described Erica's work, particularly that show in 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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