Erin Currier

The Paintings of Erin Currier

The Paintings of Erin Currier

Paperback Version ISBN 978-1-937487-63-8

Publication Date: 2012
Binding: Softbound

Pages: 166

Format: 8 x 10" - 203 x 254 m
Retail Price: US $49.99

eBook Version ISBN  978-1-937487-78-2

I have come to view Erin’s work in the context of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. Paraphrasing Benjamin, the angel’s face is turned toward the past. Where we see events unfolding, she sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage in front of her feet.  She would like to awaken the dead, and make whole what has been destroyed. But a storm that is blowing in from Paradise gets caught in her wings with such a force that the angel can no longer close them as she is propelled into the future to which her back is turned. The pile of debris before her grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. But as Erin’s Angel of History is blown backwards into the future, she witnesses the refuse of the ages piling up both as a catastrophe and as an opportunity to educate humanity, and like an political alchemist she makes art out of it; she enfleshes dignity and hope with this refuse, a refuse that, at times, appears in Erin’s hands to have more life-enhancing power than the pulsations of living flesh.

   Professor Peter McLaren

Erin Currier

Within what Hegel described as the “immeasurable realm” of individual works of art, the conditions and subjects that motivate Erin Currier’s remarkable portraiture have special significance. In a linkage that is not merely theory or proposal, herwork continues a tradition of visual story-telling that exhumes from globalized society not only the visages of activists and warriors of social justice but also the dignified, humble, and internally powerful ordinary people around the world who struggle to break free from the bonds of economic, racial, gender, and sexual servitude. Currier’s increasingly engaged art work continues the tradition of Diego Rivera and the great social-realist muralists of Latin America, as well as the intensely personal philosophical conscience found in the works of insurrectionary cultural critics like Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. For Currier, whether marooned in the high-rise housing of mega-city outskirts or squatting in low-income settlements, the world’s laborers and migrants personify the mad toll humanity pays for its immersion in the predatory dystopia of materialism, injustice, and waste.