First Friday Opening Reception: June 4, 2010, 6-9 p.m.
Golden Rule Gallery, 811 E. Burnside, Suite 122, Portland, OR 97214
Show Runs June 4th through June 27th

Artist Statement

After a childhood spent in the back country of America’s last true frontier—the vast and vastly uninhabited, unimproved expanses of Alaska, where what is human stands alone and remains foreign to what surrounds it—it is perhaps appropriate that in Erika Diehl’s paintings, drawings and prints she is continually drawn to structures that are abandoned or never-built, unknown perhaps even to man. The architectures she creates are often downright impossible, abstracted from place or time.



Her large piece “Ekphrasis” shows a building framed by sparse greenery, rooted in ground but unraveling in its dimensions. Its walls unspool into pink, red and orange ribbon cast up into the firmament; sky and house hinge onto one other in cut facets or fan out in faint pinwheel blues. In “Nostos” the floor lurches up at the wall with starkly ambivalent geometry, both solid and void at once. “Atê” turns sky into a ship’s sail, and vice versa. It is tough for any viewer to exist in these spaces with any comfort, or even to know what’s inside and what’s out. And yet, the pieces provide their own comfort and satisfaction: a quiet disquiet.



Abstract and figurative are one and the same for Diehl because her paintings have no real subjects: only objects created as pure untethered fictions. In these constructions the physical is stripped from the mundane—from the quotidian or tamped down or casually understood—tripping two steps up the chain of desire. For Diehl, art is about the integrity of the well-made object and of the materials themselves—that particular quality of paint or ink or leaf. Her work does not refer outside of itself, but rather becomes itself only as fundamental form. Diehl’s work reveals the inner lives of objects, that they have their own pasts and their own potentialities of being; they long not for us but for each other. As in the metaphysical works of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, Diehl’s architectures are imbued with undiscoverable meaning, an insular and sacrosanct ontology. She deliberately chooses her color palette from bygone eras of painting—delicate tones buried almost as relics in our cultural history—to create landscapes both foreign and nostalgic.



The title of Diehl’s current show, “Mnemosyne,” hints at the relation we end up bearing to spaces that resist any easy appropriation into our lives; in their invitation and resistance to meaning they become almost-forgotten memory. It is at this intersection of history and the feeling evoked by sheer form that Diehl’s work finds its unique force and eloquence.



Erika Diehl lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she has resided for the past 10 years. The one thing that she took with her from her intervening time in California, she says, is a particular quality of the light.



For additional information about the art or the artist, please contact Wynde Dyer at (503) 863-1545.