ERIN CURRIER
Universal Spirit
Working in a coffee shop, Erin Currier was fascinated with the amount of trash the shop produced. She began making portraits of local people as buddhas, their clothing and backgrounds composed of the shop’s detritus. She portrayed regular people—day laborers and people who perform the lowliest of tasks—not the dignitaries and royalty usually associated with portraits.
She and her late husband, Anthony
Hassett, saved up their money and began a series of world travels, meeting and living among the common people of the countries they visited—and collecting trash. Based on her experiences and her detailed sketchbooks, she returned to her studio and painted portraits of the people she had met adding bits of trash either for color or with cryptic texts which, taken out of context, had a special connection with the subject. Her subjects have been a combination of workers, people who are involved in “the struggle for human rights,” many of whom are “women with no voice.”
Recently, she has been accommodating the compositions of portraits by famous artists, often subverting their original meaning. Her most recent paintings are in the exhibition From Manet to Mexico: Mas Las Meninas at Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 13 through 25.
Currier describes her portraits as “total homage to the person.” She believes artists paint from the spirit. That universal spirit connects her with her subjects and allows her viewers to connect with them as well through her artistic production. “People also see themselves or their neighbors in the portraits,” she says.
Among the portraits in the exhibition is Magnolia Maymuru as a Not So Repentant Magdalena (after Titian) recalling the Venetian artist’s The Penitent Magdalene of 1555-65. Magnolia is a young Australian woman who participated as the first Indigenous model in the Miss World Australia competition. She had refused an earlier offer to model because she had to finish high school. She has said of her modeling career, “I want to be a role model so that beauty is seen as universal, no matter what color, size or shape you are.”
A more familiar portrait is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (after Gauguin), the firstterm member of Congress. A year before her election she had been working as a bartender to make ends meet. The cum laude graduate of Boston University who majored in international relations and economics is shown in front of a floral background that echoes Gauguin’s Tahitian portraits. The scraps reading “Epic” and “Rebel” describe the politician who speaks truth to power with statements such as “I don’t think any person in America should die because they are too poor to live.”