Erin Calla Watson
Erin Calla Watson (Los Angeles, CA, 1993) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Calla Watson received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Exhibitions include “Erin Calla Watson”, Foxy Production, New York (forthcoming 2023); “a somewhat thin line”, In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA; “KYLE”, Larder, Los Angeles (both 2022); and “The Conspiracy of Art: Part II”, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2019).
Erin Calla Watson’s new photographs channel long traditions in several fields, including visual art, literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy – where her rooms are activated with a psycho-sexual charge. She includes the dark interiors of the Dutch Golden Age paintings of licentious taverns, Virginia Woolf’s notion of a room being essential for a woman’s autonomy, and Walter Benjamin’s characterization of “the phantasmagoria of the interior” – the individual’s universe of illusion, and their protection from the outside world.
Calla Watson’s new series of photographs highlights and disrupts this weaponizing of affect by appropriating private spaces shared in online manosphere platforms and pushing them through prisms of visual modification, including inserting popular cultural icons that are replete with sentiment, angst, and trauma: — comic book character Harley Quinn, singer Britney Spears, and actor John Wayne.
The artist based her new works on a photograph showing an untidy and seemingly adolescent bedroom where items are strewn about. The space’s messiness and nebulosity as well as the transformations and cultural interventions performed upon it by the artist suggest we are witnessing a dreamscape where the repressed is expressed.
