WORK BY WOMEN/ Erin Currier: La Frontera
Currier's paintings are part portraiture, part collage constructed of disinherited consumer “waste” collected in forty countries, and part sociopolitical archive – but wholly humanist.
La Frontera takes stock of a dream shared by all of our African, Asian, European, and Indigenous ancestors alike: a dream of the Americas in the context of freedom and liberation for everyone. The work references the borders and walls one must confront in pursuit of this dream: the physical US Mexico Border and its Mediterranean counterpart; as well as institutionalized borders that impose divisions between races and economic classes. La Frontera draws light to the potential of dismantling these borders.
The use of “post-consumer” waste which comprises the works, written in every language and gathered from the world’s streets, speaks to our commonalities as humans: in the face of the increasingly disposable nature of our shared world; in terms also of our ability to transform that which is cast away into something of value—the ingenuity of our human imagination.
She lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.