Look Back At It is Erin M. Riley’s first solo presentation with mother’s tankstation. It is part of Condo London 2025; an innovative, collaborative exhibition bringing together 49 galleries across 22 London spaces. The title Look Back At It is as simple as it is confounding. Look back at what, when, how, why? Here these are crucial, life-changing, questions. Riley’s work sits Janus-like on this boundary line between ‘this’ and ‘that’, primordial aura and contemporary skepticism, timeless and timely. She uses collaged photography, digital images, selfies and photo booth imagery, rendered by hand on the arcane machinery of a loom, in coloration and manner that consciously replicates low resolution digital pixelation. Riley is aware of the involuntary reflex of memory, questioning if it is an attempt to consciously recapture or reject lost time.
Riley writes, “I am a memory keeper. And so I look back at the moments wondering why things turned out how they did? how these experiences have changed how I have interacted going forward and how incredibly frustrating it is to realise that while fighting, avoiding and healing from the demons of a generation before mine, that I, at very least, expect to accrue my own.”
“So many survivors of trauma avoid speaking about their experiences because it feels as though the emotional or physical pain can never be understood, also acknowledging that it feels like you are giving the perpetrators even more power. So I walk around the world seeing mantras that repeat in my mind, trying to summon the moment in which you did not speak. Wrong way, Do not enter. Go back. Go back and this pain and these trespasses travel with us.”
