CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST - ERIN CURRIER

girl talk TRIANGLE GIRL BY KIMBERLY NICHOLS

"Don't just sit there, do something." That's the universal activist mantra in an age where all of us are prone to sit around and complain about the state of the world's affairs over academic cocktail party ice buckets, with no logical solution to offer at the end of our gripe sessions. Recently I met a true icon of activism who is cutting a large swath through the art world using her work as her voice to inspire recognition of humanitys woes in the world at large. Together with her kick ass good looks, long flowing pre-Raphaelite hair, and the portraits of injustice she creates, Erin Cutheris a modem-dayRenaissance role model for women everywhere.

We all have voices, but Erin Currier's brand of activism can be seen through her art. In "White Zombies," two Courtney Love-esque blondes in bikinis swirl across a canvas with drugged-out consumerist gazes on their faces causing us to look more deeply at ourselves and the social images we elevate to superstar status. In the "Liberation Series:' one painting is populated with Asian service workers in SARS masks and another depicts women behind veils in the chaotic countries where Islamic policy dash with female human rights In her pieces "Cuban Schoolgirls" and the "Whores of Puerto Cabeza," we see the inherent presence of sexuality, power and strength that lies inherent in the female psyche, even while it is being oppressed and repressed. In "Tania" we see an Argentinean girl who fought and died alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia. Finally, in "Sudamerican Shelf Life," the artist herself stands clad in an Argentine soccer shirt surrounded by Bitch a Festa flyers that she found on the streets of Rio during Carnival, expressing her own solidarity towards her worldwide sisters in activism.

But it's not only the subject matter that provokes the viewer to take accountability for his or her place in humanity while viewing Erin Currier's works. It's also the material that Currier uses to compile her works- trash.

"In seeking the balance between the abundance of substances out of which art can be created, between traditions and cultures, esthetics and politics, and the conditions of men and women in their relationship to modernization, I found my medium in that which is most readily accessible in our day and age; namely,trash, says Erin. We often find the true gold in that which seems to have no beneficial purpose. Like a fool feigning idiocy in order to survive, and then win back his kingdom, the disposable world illustrates the ongoing discourse between artifice and nature. Through my work, the disposable, the profane, the discarded, the mundane, the unwanted, are reformatted into socio-spiritual urgencies, the disaster and deliverance of contemporary life."

Currier practices what she preaches. She's not the type of girl to sit in her armchair reading about the political and socio-economic trials of the world at large, but the type of girl who travels firsthand to see the world's strife, collecting important fragments from each geographic area that will later be comprised into one other magnificent trash paintings. Her material has come from China, Japan, Thailand, Nepal, India, United Arab Emirates, Italy; Spain, Czech Republic; Hungary, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay; Paraguay, Brazil and the US.

The concept of trash as art is not a new one but using it to express the portraits of mothers and martyrs, of liberators and freedom fighters provides us with the bizarre psychological conceptualism that those which we have historically dumped upon (women and the indigent) can become modern masterpieces of iconography. Most of Currier's subjects have brown faces and most of them are women. Coming from a 31-year-old American girl from squeaky-dean Massachusetts, this is impressive.

"I am deeply inspired by those involved in the social struggle, and feel compelled and responsible to participate in some small way through my art," she explains. "I believe that we are all one, and that every action taken, every word spoken by any one of us, has reverberations experienced by ALL of us."

Her next show "From Vietnam to Venezuela Bandits and Beauty Queens" is a documentary of her latest journey to Venezuela and will take place in her new hometown of Taos, New Mexico. Her extensive collection can be viewed online at www.erincurrierfineart.com

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March 31-April 13, 2006 The BottomLine