Students and Soldiers 2012

Works by Erin Currier | Acrylic and mixed media on panel

I have long made a life of traveling to other countries half of each year-- where I gather “post-consumer waste” and investigate the human realm I encounter: its individuals, cultures, and, above all, its struggles.  The materials—both tangible and philosophical—are then transported in boxes and in travel journals, to my studio in New Mexico, whereby they are forged into a new series of collaged works.  This past year, however, I remained in the United States, in New Mexico, to work on a series of commissions, as well as to assist in the publication by CSF Publishing of a significant portion of my oeuvre.  Not unexpectedly, the struggles I have encountered throughout Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, have now reemerged in the United States, and have provided a fertile ground from which this new series of work has flowered.

Like wildfires ignited by the spark of the Arab Spring, social movements have begun to flare across the United States, leaving our nation newly ablaze in debate and in action.  As trillions of US dollars are printed as fodder for the furnaces of both foreign wars and domestic bank bailouts, homes are being foreclosed on, teachers and workers laid off, and schools and clinics shut down.  United States veterans are returning home from wars fought abroad, only to find themselves without adequate health care, without employment, and on the street.  United States soldiers are committing suicide at a rate of one per day.  Not surprisingly, many soldiers are asking, “What are we fighting for?”  Likewise, students are returning home from university deeply in debt (one trillion dollars to date, increasing at the rate of $3,000 per second ), without adequate healthcare, without employment or even hope of future employment, often to their parent’s foreclosed-on homes.  They, too, are asking, “What are we going to school for?  What is the purpose of education?” Echoed by a growing number of soldiers, teachers, civil servants, workers, mothers, daughters, and, sometimes even policemen, students are questioning, “What are we as a nation at this point? What are our values?  What does our future look like, and, more importantly, what do we want our future to look like?”

For me, the origin of this exhibition began while living as an expat in Berlin and continued in Cairo just weeks after the January 25th, 2011 revolution.  Shortly after Europe’s May Day protests, I returned to my own country to bear witness to, and participate in, the myriad movements toward social change. 

 Students and Soldiers/Estudiantes y Soldados, represents the inquiry and discourse in which we in the United States now find ourselves engaged:  issues of the morality and efficacy of targeted drone attacks abroad, and the use of drones by police departments domestically; the ongoing surveillance of the American Muslim community; the question of whether divulging classified information regarding war crimes constitutes the crime of treason; the censorship of books; the mass incarceration of African American youth; women’s rights; and increasing racism.  

It is my hope that this series will compel the viewer to further inquiry and action.