From Paris to Phnom Penh: An Ontography

Works by Erin Currier | Acrylic and mixed media on panel

My art-making concerns and process are three fold: first, I am a “travelling ontographer”, documenting through drawing the people, animals, birds, plants, objects, and environments that I encounter abroad; secondly, I collect discarded ephemera from the streets of the world; finally, I incorporate the above findings—the treasures and the trash—into portraits that celebrate both historic and contemporary figures who resist or defy (or defy through resistance) authority; as well as people who, whether by choice or circumstance or both, exist outside of their societies’ conventions. My work is comprised of both discarded trash and packaging I find on my travels, as well as acrylic paint and glaze. The discarded waste is re-transfigured into, hopefully, something of beauty; in the same way that the cast off, discarded human beings who are the subject of many of my portraits are, themselves, re-contextualized through the privileged position of portraiture historically relegated to oil barons and kings. My use of trash is thus meant as a poetic incantation. It is a chant of the multitude of people and of things from below and outside, resisting any unified empire: both a call to prayer and a call to arms for a counter power rooted in the imagination.
My latest series in progress, From Paris to Phnom Penh: An Ontography, is in this spirit. The series focuses on the idea of autonomy—be it the spiritual autonomy of immanence as opposed to transcendence (of the sort that bypasses religious authority in favor of direct engagement with the sacred); the economic autonomy of the black market and of unorthodox, under-the-table livelihoods; or the creative autonomy possible through music, poetry, and art.