Shirreff has, over the past few years, developed a unique video idiom: she re-photographs a found photograph hundreds of times under a range of different lighting conditions before digitally suturing the stills into a seamless video. Works such as Roden Crater (2009) and Lake (2012) take a landscape photograph as their starting point, but Shirreff’s process transforms the still picture into a dynamic play of light and form. In a new video, Medardo Rosso, Madame X, 1896 (2013), Shirreff applies her method to a historical photograph of a well-known Medardo Rosso sculpture. Shirreff subverts the supposedly fixed image of an analogue image, creating the experience of shape, perspective and duration we normally experience with sculpture. Medardo Rosso, Madame X, 1896 generates a strange alchemy of light, conjuring breathtaking atmospheric effects from a modest set of tools.

Erin Shirreff was born in 1975 in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2005 she graduated from Yale with an MFA in sculpture. Recent exhibitions include Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2013), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California (2013), ‘The Locker Plant’, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2011) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2010).