In my paintings I build detritus into the layers as an accumulation of my daily events. Months
and sometimes years of embedded material are a means to an end to achieve a thick, textured
painting.
For this project I’ve assembled the detritus devoid of my security blanket veil of paint. These
are various collected items laid bare. It’s a composite of my timeline—shreds and scraps of
ephemera pieced together to tell a story. Putting these pieces together reminded me of the
classic 17th c. children’s rhyme, “Humpty Dumpty”:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
I’m challenging the hopeless demise of Humpty Dumpty and embracing the philosophy of
Kintsugi. Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of repairing treasured ceramic items that have been
broken. Artisans carefully reassemble the shards with an adhesive of luminous molten gold.
The beloved item is renewed with a fresh sense of beauty—leaning into the imperfections, and
introducing an enhanced iteration when the object of sentimentality and function is
transformed into a work of art.
Erika Ranee received her MFA in painting from UC Berkeley, CA and her BFA from the School
of Visual Arts, NY. She has recently participated in group shows at the Brooklyn Museum, the
Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, PPOW Gallery, Bienvenu Steinberg & C, and
CANADA Gallery. In 2024, Ranee had her first institutional solo exhibition at the Center for the
Arts at Virginia Tech as well as a solo show at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton,
NY. She is a recipient of an Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) grant and two New York
Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowships in painting. She has been awarded studio grants
from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Abrons Arts Center, and the Skowhegan School
of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, the
Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, MI, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA. She works in
New York.