Masottatorres - Nodo de arte contemporaneo

There was never a question: I have been drawing from the moment I could hold a crayon in my hand, at less than a year old! Art is less a choice and more a necessity for me. Art is a refuge, a pastime, a joy,- as crucial to my existence as water, air, or food, and it is also my means of participating in a larger social struggle.

In addition to drawing and painting, I use trash- ie packaging, scraps of paper, empty boxes- refuse that I collect in the streets all over the world. Artists have always used materials readily available and close-at-hand in their work; for some, this has meant clay, marble, or wood, for me, this means the discarded daily remnants of our global consumer culture.
Often packaging itself is a graphic work of art, gracing products used to prop up and affirm personalities and identities, but with great irony, as the product and its packaging are often mass-produced by millions of overlooked, underpaid, marginalized workers, then sold in kiosks and on the streets by millions more, only to be mass-consumed and discarded by further millions!
My work pays homage to those very workers and vendors, drawing to light their human struggles, as well as paying homage to activists involved in the struggle for human rights.

Two years ago, I was honored to have a solo exhibition of my work at the Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela Embajada in Washington D.C., where I exhibited some of the many pieces inspired by my extensive visits to Latin America. These included portraits of Manuela Saenz, Simon Bolivar, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Hebe de Bonafini, Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo, Augusto Sandino, Emiliano Zapata, Zapatistas, Sandinistas, Rigoberto Lopez Perez, Gioconda Belli, Ernesto Cardinal, Ruben Dario, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Cuban Schoolgirls, Bolivian sheshiners, Argentine soccor players, Nicaraguan mothers, Ecuadoran vendors, and more.

These are the words by the Columbian writer, professor, scholar, and activist, Nathalia Jaramillo:

"Erin Currier is a visual storyteller whose art exhumes from memory the histories and struggles waged on behalf of the dispossessed. Her portraiture reveals the settling dust of revolutionary figures, from the distant past and not-so-distant present, who we can assume have made a lasting impression on Erin and how she sees the world. This dust-storm is born anew in her upcoming exhibit, Miss World, which introduces us to the sensual, laboring, spiritual, and defiant bodies of women, whose reflections often remain buried in the layered terrain of the collective imaginary.

The women of Miss World are the everyday citizen-subjects who labor and love against the social backdrop of economic and personal exploitation. In this new series, Erin has provided a powerful counter-story to the Eurocentric concept of a ‘grand slam beauty pageant.' In stark contrast to the constructions of female beauty that emphasize a withering away of body and mind as the universal symbol of womanhood, Erin's female subjects portray the politically embodied subjectivity of women at recurring moments in their daily lives. There is no push to crown any woman queen in Miss World; there is a different alchemy in motion in this series.

The layers of meaning embedded within Erin's art, through her use of ‘trash' and mixed collages that create powerful landscapes of the women she paints, invite us to question the ‘other' universal themes and economic and political relations that bring together resisting/ luchadora women around the world. The portraits caution us to reconsider the corpus of symbolic landmarks that we use collectively to determine our location in time and space, to think anew about the effects of patriarchy, the economy and consumerism in our globalized society, and to open our minds to the ordinary acts of everyday social struggle. As an artist, Erin not only names those antagonisms that fleck the landscape of the social, she also gives us a visual language of hope. The engagement with the viewer may be subtle or more overtly transformative. When the dust finally settles, Erin and the women of the series remind us that every luchadora has a story to tell. "

For nearly a decade, I have been travelling the world, collecting trash for my work, interacting with, sketching, and photographing people I meet, researching histories, cultures, and social struggles, formulating ideas with which result in series of 25-30 pieces which I exhibit annually: primarily in New Mexico, but also internationally. This year, I will be having a joint exhibition at Masottatorres, solo exhibitions at the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Parks Gallery, Taos, New Mexico; with involvement in group shows in the works in Italy and Los Angeles, California.