Erin Currier & Anthony Hassett ~ Artists, Travelers, Activists, Partners

Our Spring Studio Visit with Santa Fe, New Mexico Art Partners

Erin Currier & Anthony Hassett

 

My partner, artist Richard Kurtz and I visited the Santa Fe studio and home of artists, world travelers and partners Erin Currier & Anthony Hassett. We met their new puppy Foca & shared good coffee that Tony made for us as we visited and saw Erin’s work in process for her fall 2014 show at Blue Rain Gallery.

They told us wonderful tales from their world travels, were very generous, kind and warm, as always.

 

 

 “My art-making concerns and process are three fold: first, as a traveling ontographer documenting through drawing the environments that I encounter abroad; secondly, I collect discarded ephemera from the streets of the world; finally, I incorporate the above findings into portraits that celebrate figures who resist or defy authority; as well as people who exist outside of their societies’ conventions.” 

Erin Currier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 “The many in this world who expect nothing from those in power — not even a plot of land for their graves–deserve to be not only listened to, but to be believed… Every person in this world has equal value, and deserves the right to live: with clean water, fresh food, and shelter; to learn: in schools free to everyone; and to love: with well-being, and in peace.”

Erin Currie

 

 

 

 

 

“Marooned in high-rise housing in mega-city outskirts, squatting without tenure in low-income settlements, the world’s poor occupy a variety of urban and rural orbits, many residing in hand-me-down housing. Whatever their former grandeur, most of Guatemala’s palomares, Rio’s avenidas, Buenos Aires’s and Santiago’s conventillos, Quito’s quintas and Old Havana’s cuarterias are overcrowded, unsanitary badlands of urbanization’s un-kept promises.

Within the strange, small enclave, which chooses to call itself “the art world,” these conditions are regarded as having special portent. In a linkage that is not merely theory or proposal, both Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol questioned the premises of Urban Culture itself: Warhol concentrated on the folly, and reality, of capitalism and its effects, while Beuys appealed to nature as an escape from the predatory gangsterism of culture. The ideologically saturated images that spewed from the Factory read like color studies under the control of an elevated purpose: to impose clarity on the familiar, providing a cynical but realistic glimpse into a formalized dystopia.”

Anthony Hassett

 

 

 

 

“Elsewhere in the art world, the tradition of archetypal portraiture continues, much of it deeply tinged by the trademark

clichés of media-heroic male figures from the pantheon of political immortals. Shimmering with iconicity, bursting with the rhetoric of the grand Romantic ego, they blind us to the great overflow of meanings and associations they once represented: that triage of humanity, those great, stigmatized, redundant masses of human beings that power reduces to bomb targets and surplus labor in whatever version fits your model of revolution or progress.

In a different evaluation, the work of Erin Currier is part of a more recent and upcoming attention to another kind of representation of humanity: one that is neither elitist nor exclusionary, that doesn’t reduce its subject to a lifeless substance through hyper-realism or mechanized picturing. Instead, Currier’s art appeals to lovers of politics, art and literature alike, making sense of images that are, primarily, concerned about us and the world we live in.” 

 Anthony Hassett

 

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“My work is comprised of discarded trash 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 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 a poetic incantation a call for a counter power rooted in the imagination.”

Erin Currier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fly Girl • Erin Currier by Jennifer Esperanza

 

 

Please Watch Erin Currier on ¡COLORES! • PBS

Santa Fe artist Erin Currier transforms trash into works of beauty.

http://portal.knme.org/video/2365237617/

Anthony’s show “The Western Lands” is now showing at Capitol Coffee Co. in Santa Fe, New Mexico

For information on Erin & Anthony’s upcoming shows please visits their websites.

Erin’s Website ~ Erin Currier Fin Art 

http://.erincurrierfineart.com

Anthony’s Website ~ Anthony Hasset 

http://www.anthonyhassett.com/X/Home.html

 

 

Erin Opens my book I Like My Heroes Real available on Blurb

Her quote defines her heart & mine & my whole book

http://www.blurb.com/b/3241702-i-like-my-heroes-real

“The many in this world who expect nothing from those in power — not even a plot of land for their graves–deserve to be not only listened to, but to be believed… Every person in this world has equal value, and deserves the right to live: with clean water, fresh food, and shelter; to learn: in schools free to everyone; and to love: with well-being, and in peace.”

Erin Currier

 

 

Friends & Artists ~ Erin Currier & Jennifer Esperanza Santa Fe, New Mexico 2014