Chapter NY is pleased to announce שכינה (Shekinah), Erin Jane Nelson’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will present her most recent series of fabric-wrapped panel works and ceramic vessels.

Nelson’s practice is grounded in photography sourced from her personal archive of found and original images. She works serially, with each project delving into new conceptual frameworks as far ranging as the cultural anxiety around climate change, the sentience of octopuses, and the science fiction of our present moment. Her photographic elements merge onto unexpected support structures, their multiple references engaging the nuanced anxiety, conflict, and humor of the present and immediate future.

For this exhibition, Nelson embraces her Southern Jewish heritage as subject matter. The title of the exhibition, Shekinah, a word from rabbinical literature that means the feminine attributes of God, a sense of place in the world, a dwelling, has been Nelson’s framework for spiritual seeking. Based on research and photographs made while studying Judaism over the last year, she incorporates Jewish symbolism and archival photographs into this new work alongside her ongoing photographic practice documenting the environmental collapse of her home region.

Along with ceramics, found textiles and collaged photographs typical of earlier bodies of work, Nelson uses natural dying techniques that impregnate her works with the colors and ghosts of plants and insects. Her seeping and decaying forms, mixed with personally relevant subject matter, are inspired by poet Joyelle McSweeney’s concept of the necropastoral, a political-aesthetic space in which human depredations converge with nature’s decay. Coupled with an idealism of religion’s ability to heal and give guidance for mourning, Nelson leaves room for moments of respite and purpose within a fraught world.

Raised in the American South, Erin Jane Nelson lives and works in Atlanta, GA. In 2011 she received her BFA from The Cooper Union. Recent solo exhibitions include: Her Deepness, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA; Psychopompopolis, Document Gallery, Chicago; and Dylan, Hester, New York. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec, France; Deli Gallery, Brooklyn; Van Doren Waxter, New York; Capital Gallery, San Francisco; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work is currently included in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019 at the Whitney, which has recently acquired the artist’s work. Nelson will also be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.