cam.contemporarie presents, Harlequin Choreographies, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Erol Scott Harris. Serving as an epilogue to graduate school, Harris’ homecoming to Chicago features a presentation of select works from his Yale MFA thesis. Pushing his familiar and signature medium, linoleum vinyl flooring, into new directions, these recently developed monoprints and floor installation conjure the spirit of his ancestors' handiwork, in this deeply personal work.
For Harris, painting is an arena, or a choreographed dance to explore the full spectrum of bodily experience, and each material choice carries metaphorical weight – graphite as bone, liquid agents as bodily fluids, canvas, linoleum, and plastic as skin. “Through carefully constructed studio situations, I allow my body to unfold in time, creating works that function simultaneously as performance relics, concretions of lived experience, and materializations of possibility. I'm fascinated by how our bodies and sense of self dissolve, evolve, and reverberate within unified space." The term harlequin very much embodies both the performative nature of Harris’ use of his body within the practice of making through his very structured studio interventions, but also in the iconography of the diamond within the material itself.
Harris has grown accustomed to using linoleum vinyl flooring as a canvas for his abstract paintings that explore identity, familial lore, migration, and labor. It began as a way to honor his grandparents’ background as laborers – they migrated from Códoba, Spain to Guanajuato and Zamora, México – and ultimately found themselves as migrant laborers working in vinyl floor installation and on Chicago’s railroads.The vinyl flooring Harris is known for using is actual flooring from his grandparent’s days working in the industry. This new body of work extensively explores this history, even down to the forms found within his series of color monoprints, which are in the shape of train conductor hole punches from the Metro North Rail Line in Chicago, which his late grandfather worked on.
Over several trips back to Chicago during his graduate studies, Harris balanced school, caring for his grandfather, and doing research on archival ephemera relating to flooring and the railroads to address the erasure and commodification of his family’s culture, history, and traditions. In the fall of 2024, an electrical fire set the oak floor of the living room of his grandparents’ home ablaze and in the process of cleaning, he discovered several layers of various linoleum flooring beneath the wood. The monoprints on view are made from the salvaged tiles from the homeward printed using a pigment composed of the char of the oak living room floor that caught fire.
This new body of work is likely the most deliberate reference to the floor, in terms of its material use, in his trajectory working with the material. After the fire, Harris found himself increasingly more curious about the chemistry and manipulation of the material. Typically his large vinyl works often rarely resemble the flooring they are known for, except for the recognizable and repetitive diamond sequence that is then covered with body contours that form into fluid movements of color, with various layers of shapes, patterns, and appendages.The floor installation, ALWAYS A STACK IN THE STUDIO (Urban Dictionary: “A STACK”= $1,000 [one grand]), consists of layered vinyl squares that Harris dug into like an archeological site and embedded mementos salvaged from the fire alongside newspaper clippings, crystals, glass and bits of other paintings. Its position on top of a platform is meant to resemble a small stage.
“My entire life, post womb, is theatre. For me the stage's glory is wrapped in Linoleum.”
