BASEL.- Ehrlich Steinberg is presenting BRAD by Los Angeles-based artist Erin Calla Watson for Liste 2026, featuring a new series of direct-to-substrate UV printed aluminum works and a new video. The presentation takes its name from online meme subcultures which parody various ‘manosphere’ archetypes, often giving them exaggerated or stereotypically masculine traits.
The booth centers around Calla Watson’s new wall-based works, depicting environments sourced from r/malelivingspace, a subreddit for men to share and discuss their domestic spaces. The posted photos, often showing pared back interiors such as monochrome furniture and gaming set-ups, point to the users’ collective views on what constitutes an appropriate male living space. The artist reconstitutes the images as 3D renders, giving the work both a dreamlike and hyper-real quality that reflects the subreddit’s duality between ideal and base male living.
Here, Calla Watson continues her practice of placing seemingly incongruous objects and figures into appropriated imagery. For this series, the artist inserts oversized Beanie Babies, a line of plush, stuffed animals popular in the late 1990s. Continually sought-after collectibles, the toys became symbols of speculative desire, manufactured scarcity, and viral circulation, later becoming the subject of numerous auctions and counterfeiting scams.
In Domino, the titular bear sits slumped against the back wall of a sparsely furnished room, accompanied by a monitor and video game controller on the floor. Light emanating from a nearby corridor suggests an unseen presence. In Pinchers, a red lobster hangs halfway out of an unmade bed, with an assault rifle resting against the window, and a day’s worth of laundry and detritus layering the floor. The artist renders the rifle in a toy-like metallic sheen, blurring the distinction between plaything and weapon, simulation and reality. Against these backdrops, Calla Watson’s interventions introduce a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality at odds with the rooms’ otherwise cool, detached, and practical aesthetics.
The artist’s new video, Maternity, features found clips of female models wearing prosthetic pregnancy bellies for fast-fashion e-commerce websites. The visuals are accompanied by subtitles in the style of music-video lyrics, composed from Calla Watson’s own prose and drawing on R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps young-adult horror book series, poet Ingeborg Bachmann’s sole novel Malina, and sad-boy rock band lyrics. The video continues the artist’s exploration of the American middle class and the erosion of the traditional nuclear family, examining how these ideals are continually mediated and commodified through online culture. Viral content now moves seamlessly between mourning the supposedly lost archetype of the ‘trad-wife’ and presenting procreation as limiting, undesirable, or passé.
Erin Calla Watson received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2023. Previous solo exhibitions include Nymph at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Laddy Daddy Dah at Rinde am Rhein, Dusseldorf, DE (2024); (Untitled) n.d. at Foxy Production, New York, NY (2023) and KYLE at Larder, Los Angeles, CA (2022). Selected group exhibitions include Everything looks dark now at Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA (2026); Display at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA; Proof of Concept: Photography at Briefing Room, Brussels, BE (2024); Unto Dust at Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, FR (2023); Video Store at Foxy Production, New York, NY (2023); a somewhat thin line at In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA; At Land at Foxy Production, New York, NY (2022) and The Conspiracy of Art: Part II at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Calla Watson’s work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Artillery, CARLA, Cultured, Mousse, Numero, Objectiv, Section, and STUDIO Magazine. The artist is included in the upcoming group exhibition GAG: The Art of Comic Trouble at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2026).
