Erin Wright

Sow & Tailor is thrilled to present The Host, The Thief, The Wives, and Their Lovers, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Erin Wright.

The Host, The Thief, The Wives, and Their Lovers delves into the intricacies of social interaction within a dinner party, exploring the chaos and subtle nuances of human behavior and societal norms. Renowned for her meticulous photorealist work, hand-painted in acrylic on stretched canvas, Erin Wright showcases mastery in HER materials and visual language.

The Host, The Thief, The Wives, and Their Lovers centers around two central large-scale works and a collection of smaller vignettes, weaving a cinematic visual narrative of communal dining dynamics. One painting freezes a ritualistic table, embodying the host's idealization and setting the stage for the unfolding drama. In contrast, the companion painting transforms the table into a silent witness, portraying spilled wine, scattered crumbs, and disheveled utensils—a narrative capturing the dynamic nature inherent in communal dining.

Imagining the dinner table as an absurdist theater stage, Wright skillfully maps out the choreographed etiquette for a successful dinner party. This structured choreography unravels into a captivating canvas portraying the complex dance of social norms and behaviors. Erin Wright's paintings shed light on peculiar behaviors and rituals often overlooked in our conscious thought. Humorous and surreal moments are skillfully faceted within Wright’s scenes, like a friendly green frog hidden in a garden salad, bringing levity to the mundane setting commonly seen at the dinner table. Communal dining emerges as a profound exploration of human connection, prompting viewers to reconsider unspoken rules governing shared meals and offering unique insights into how we relate within this complex and delicate social ritual.

The Host, The Thief, The Wives, and Their Lovers invites the viewer on a visual journey beyond everyday actions, unraveling layers of meaning in seemingly ordinary communal dining—a unique lens providing profound insights into human relationships.

Erin Wright (b. 1990, Memphis, TN, USA) is a painter and professor of architecture at Woodbury University. She studied fine arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 2012) and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles (M. Arch, 2016). Wright's paintings, which are colored by the classic still-life genre and appear digitally produced, depict intimate and ruinous relationships between objects and characters that are not present. Through her compositions, Wright explores ideas such as indifference and presentation, examining every detail equivocally. Groupings and relationships between objects are rendered non-hierarchically, becoming blatantly arbitrary with uncanny relationships to their surroundings and contexts.

Wright has participated in numerous exhibitions at Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles (2023), Wedge Gallery, Burbank (2022, 2018); Field Projects, New York (2022); Spring/Break Art Show, Los Angeles (2022); New York Design Week, New York (2021); Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn (2020); Showhouse Jay, Antwerp (2020); 327 Livermore, Los Angeles (2019); Maple Street Construct, Omaha (2018); and Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (2017). Her work has been featured in ArtMaze Magazine, New American Paintings, AD Magazine, and The New York Times. Wright’s work is part of the NexAir and Wynn Infiniti corporate collections.