Erin Currier
– Artist’s Website –
Mixed media collage and acrylic on panel, 60″h x 48″w, 2013
From the New York Times: SANA, Yemen — I LEARNED that my 16-year-old grandson, Abdulrahman — a United States citizen — had been killed by an American drone strike from news reports the morning after he died. Read more.
Artist Statement:
My art-making concerns and process are three fold:
first, as a traveling ontographer documenting through drawing the environments that I encounter abroad;
secondly, I collect discarded ephemera from the streets of the world;
finally, I incorporate the above findings into portraits that celebrate figures who resist or defy authority; as well as people who exist outside of their societies’ conventions.
My work is comprised of discarded trash I find on my travels as well as acrylic paint and glaze. The discarded waste is re-transfigured into, hopefully, something of beauty; in the same way that discarded human beings, who are the subject of many of my portraits are, themselves, re-contextualized through the privileged position of portraiture, historically relegated to oil barons and kings.
My use of trash is thus a poetic incantation -a call for a counter power rooted in the imagination.
Erin Currier 2014
Erin Currier: Art Is a Necessary Element of Every Revolution, Truthout