Lobby Project Art Opening Featuring Erin Curtis:
Join local art lovers to celebrate the newest art installation featuring Erin Curtis. Curtis’ work explores geometric abstraction, decoration, repetition and ornamentation and their historical roots in weaving, architecture, ritual and body ornamentation. She finds inspiration in sources as varied as Islamic textiles, large-scale apartment construction, traditional bricklaying patterns and folk art vision imagery. Curtis’ paintings can often be read as collisions of architecture and decoration, or as abstract fields of fluctuating pattern hanging like architecture in space or directly on the wall. Her recent work has focused on creating physically and optically layered images where color and form are equal expressive elements, acting in tandem to create an exuberance that can come close to visual cacophony.
Diamond Landscape—which could have alternately been titled Good Luck 2015—is comprised of 126 square birch panels that come together to form one work. Largely an abstract-geometric work, the piece also contains, tucked within the larger structure, auspicious imagery for a new year, including rabbits, feathers and of course, diamonds. Created to be read from the distance of the street and enjoyed at arms length the work is inspired by antique Soumak rugs, an interest in visual puzzles and the hand weavings of Anni Albers.
Image: Erin Curtis, Diamond Landscape (detail), 2015. Acrylic on birch panel.
NoMa’s art openings, part of the Lobby Project, display original works from DC and Baltimore artists through a partnership with Washington Project for the Arts. Since 2013, the Lobby Project has brought comfortable furniture, great art and programming to the formerly empty lobby of 1200 First Street, NE. More on the Lobby Project and upcoming dates at www.nomabid.org/events.