Erin Calla Watson at Ehrlich Steinberg

Erin Calla Watson, Flightless Bird, American Mouth (2025). UV print on mirrored glass, 60 × 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Walsh.

May 31–July 26, 2025

The five sizeable prints in Nymph, Erin Calla Watson’s recent exhibition at Ehrlich Steinberg, immersed viewers in a sequence of accidents, transgressions, and uncanny lines of sight. Watson’s greyscale images of outmoded interiors in disarray are only speciously legible. Rendered on mirrored glass, these works persistently disrupt our gaze by furnishing run-ins with our own tenebrous reflections, transforming the act of apprehension into an agitating chain of double takes.

Watson’s scenes in this exhibition were drawn from The Lonely Doll, a series of 10 children’s books made by photographer Dare Wright between 1957 and 1981. Using text and staged black-and-white photos, Wright chronicled a burgeoning family relationship between a girl doll (named Edith), a stuffed bear, and his impish cub, manipulating the three figurines with invisible fishing line to render allegories of mischief and bonhomie, impertinence and paternalism. In Watson’s slick UV prints, the doll and the bears are absent, yet the settings and material consequences of their actions remain eerily conspicuous.

Cut down to a knee-high perspective, we confront a haphazard knee-high tower of books collapsing from atop an ottoman in Supermassive Black Hole (all works 2025). A glass pendulum clock on the ornate mantlepiece overhead looks to be tumbling down, too. Flightless Bird, American Mouth lands the viewer in a clothes closet. Through louvered doors, we peer out at a steely vanity set, where the words “Mr. Bear is just a silly old thing” are scribbled across an ovoid mirror in lipsticked letters. So Yesterday provides a supplementary close-up of the same graffiti. It shows a handheld mirror resting on the dressing table that casts back an inversion of the ‘Mr.’ written on the vanity, emphasizing the funhouse effects latent in specular surfaces. In Glory Box, we see evidence of an impromptu haircut at the foot of a tidy bed, and a child’s portrait and spider’s web traced in a naive hand across the white expanse of the overhanging sheets.

Whereas Dare Wright’s fables invite the reader’s seamless self-projection, Watson’s prints simultaneously stimulate and frustrate the viewer’s instinct for identification and narrative. They convey causal indeterminacy, foregrounding infractions and abuses that unfold with no perpetrator or victim in sight. By emitting wavering reflections and alternating between a child’s and an adult’s point of view, the prints engender the sense that protean versions of our selves may haunt the world they portray. They goad viewers to search their minds for memories that could be situated within these contexts, awakening corresponding feelings of dread, exhilaration, shame, and indignation. Squaring up against Watson’s works, we may feel they animate opposite attitudes and personas within us, clashing rebellious juvenile impulses against austere attempts at self-governance.

Though they masquerade as photos, Watson’s compositions are snapshots of virtual 3D environments extrapolated from Wright’s images. Comparisons between the original pictures and Watson’s prints reveal omnipresent textural smoothening, an enhanced appearance of corporeal volume, and slight shifts in the overall field of view. The books and perfume bottles that have migrated to Watson’s world, for example, have been plumped up and wiped clean of any text that might distinguish them.

Watson’s art is one of both formal invention and bricolage. The contour drawings that appear on the bed sheets in Glory Box and on two pieces of paper in the foreground of Supermassive Black Hole superimpose motifs from illustrations by Henry Darger (1892–1973). A self-taught and reclusive artist, Darger created hundreds of watercolors and collages to illuminate his fantasy novel In the Realms of the Unreal (c. 1910s–1930s), a capacious account of a war waged by a Christian alliance to liberate a population of child-slaves from a patriarchal nation. Piqued by his depictions of nude prepubescent girls with penises, as well as their maltreatment by adult men, many have speculated about possible correspondences between Darger’s biography and his oeuvre.

Critics have alternately treated Realms as an expression of Darger’s wish to adopt children, and as evidence that he was a pedophile, or that he may have been queer or gender dysphoric.¹  Dare Wright’s biographer was likewise keen to interpret The Lonely Doll as a metaphor for its author’s desire to reunite with her brother and father.² If Watson’s deft choreography of these intertexts evokes such psycho-biographic readings, it seems to be as a diverting feint. Consider, also, her decision to freight her artworks with still more potential meanings by appropriating titles from ’90s and aughts pop songs.³ Rather than disclosing information about Watson’s identity (other than the scope of her interests), her prints center allusions and omissions as aesthetic sites that elicit extravagant interpretations from viewers, reflecting our discrete biases.

The most jarring picture in Nymph depicts the Twin Towers ascending high into the Manhattan skyline. Their familiar silhouettes jump out as the only exterior scene in the exhibition, and the sole image of a premises that has not (yet) been altered by an act of iconoclasm. Captured from a low angle and bisected by the railings of an urban patio, the shot represents one among millions of exchangeable vantages. With its title (When I was a young boy, My father took me into the city, To see a marching band), salvaged from the opening lyrics of My Chemical Romance’s multi-platinum 2006 single “Welcome to the Black Parade,” the work calls attention to the eclectic psychological impacts of mass events. It indicates that some experiences are so confounding in their scale and severity, and so distorted by ensuing cycles of repression, substitution, and mythmaking, that they can never be reconciled by an individual, much less a nation. A symbol of the current zeitgeist—one that’s been shaped by paranoid domestic and foreign policies—the Towers portend our interminable and mercurial search for the phantom enemy within.

Sebastian Zinn (b. 1995, Portland, Oregon) is a writer in Los Angeles.

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