Condition report, 2024–
Aluminum and bronze slag, thrift store jewelry chain, glass and plastic beads, fishing sinkers, pennies, polyurethane foam and nurdles (Shell Polymers Monaca, PA) collected from the Ohio River, and foam “stones” and spotted lantern flies encased in beeswax, resin, nail polish and sugar.
Tangled, trailing, and glinting in the dim light, Erin Mallea’s installation Condition Report suspends the remnants of industry, consumption, and ecological transformation in a delicate choreography. Here, aluminum and bronze slag—cast-off ghosts of manufacture—commingle with the ornamentation of bygone adornments. Pennies, relics of exchange, and nurdles (embryonic plastics washed ashore) whisper of a world shaped by extraction and excess. The spotted lantern fly, sealed in beeswax and lacquer, is less an ecological threat than a vessel for human anxiety, its vilification exposing the impulse to cast nature as an enemy to be controlled. In this constellation of waste and ornament, it becomes a cipher for hysteria—its image shimmering with imposed meaning. Like dust collecting in a room or visions snagged in the corners of sleep, these remnants insist on their presence, weaving together a suspended interior. Waste hums with a lingering life.”
Patrick Bova and Lucas Regazzi, curators, every speck of dust illuminated, March l 14–April 18, 2025, Tomayko Foundation
Untitled (photographs), 2023–ongoing
Archival Pigment Prints
Installation photos by Chris Uhren and Erin Mallea at Tomayko Foundation, 2025 and Sean Carrol at (___), 2024.
⇨ Press + Media ⇨
Two Takes on Tomayko: Every Speck of Dust Illuminated, Petrichor, April 11, 2025