I keep a few notebooks around from the past few decades of organizing and arranging art publications, mostly chicken scratch as reminders or thoughts of the structure or flow of an issue, sometimes a drawing when I was bored in a meeting. When I saw that Erica Eyres created a series of paintings based on “images found in her collection of outdated textbooks for stage and film make-up,” on view now at Moosey in Norwich, I was curious to look back at what my old journals would show. And it is fascinating to make sense of the past, whether you participated in it or not. And I think that is what makes Eyres works so fun (she calls the show, Inside Jokes); you don’t have to be there to understand the idea of the photos or the memories that we left behind that were, so to speak, the backstage of our lives.
The works are also shown alongside a series of works based on photographs that Eyres purchased online under the search term “girl next door,” which, fair enough, I can’t say that I have done the same and if I had done the same I don’t think they would as tame as the images you see here. I’m not being crass, but I can only assume what one finds with that search in the American trash heap of algorithmic searching in 2026. But those, too, create a fascinating familiarity, even if it isn’t our story. It is our collective memory of the past, the ways we presented ourselves, the ideas we had of a “special night out,” as many of these photos seem to depict.
Eyres paints with the near sepia tones of old film, where she allows a setting and a time to come through in each work. I like that, I like that I understand a time passed, a moment in the distance, the character that is not of a selfie but of a camera placed in front of the subject and considered. A wonderful Inside Joke. —The Unibrow
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