Erin Shirreff has always been interested in what happens to an object once it becomes a picture. Her new solo exhibition at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, simply called New Work, pushes that question further: the Canadian artist takes her own sculptures apart in photographs and rebuilds them as images that could never exist in three dimensions. The show opened on 30 October in the gallery's back rooms and runs to 19 December.

At the heart of the presentation is Ctlg, a series of collaged archival pigment prints. Each is assembled from layered photographs of cast parts from Shirreff's earlier sculptures, stacked into invented forms that look plausible at first glance and impossible on a second. Shapes jut, fold and stretch past the limits of gravity, weightless and unmoored on pale blue grounds, yet solidly grounded at the same time.

Alongside them hang cyanotype photograms, toned to brown, dusty purple, pink and muted blue. Made without a camera, they carry the faint traces of curves, sharp lines and dark shadows, as if the forms had passed briefly across the paper and left only their afterimage. For Shirreff, the photogram is a kind of two-dimensional sculpture: it keeps the depth of an object while living entirely on a single plane.

Shirreff was born in 1975 and lives and works in Montreal. Her recent solo exhibitions include the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2025 and SITE Santa Fe in 2024, and a monograph covering twenty years of her photography, sculpture and video was published this year. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou and the National Gallery of Canada, among others.