Dine’ Activist Leona Morgan as Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Dine’ Activist Leona Morgan as Saint Kateri Tekakwitha

Erin Currier

– Artist’s Website –
Mixed media collage and acrylic on panel, 36″h x 24″w, 2013

Erin shares about this painting: “Kateri is the Patron Saint of Ecology–it seemed fitting for the young environmental activist and community organizer, Leona Morgan, to be represented by her. Leona is the Coordinator of Eastern Navajo Dine Against Uranium Mining and Saint Kateri is one of only four other Native American Saints recognized by the Catholic Church.”
— at Blue Rain Gallery.

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

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