Erinn Kathryn is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, mixed media, sculpture, and installation. Her work has been exhibited in Portland, Oregon galleries including Guardino Gallery, Good: a gallery, Lightbox Kulturhaus, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Multnomah Arts Center, and in Fairbanks Alaska at Bear Gallery and Alaska House Gallery. She was a 2012 Regional Arts and Culture Council Project Grant recipient and a 2014 Project Grant Award collaborator with fellow artist Tyler Corbett.
In 2016, in collaboration with Tylor Corbett, Kathryn created FMRL, a site-specific installation constructed from thousands of pieces of refuse collected from the streets of Portland, which was funded in part by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Kathryn studied dance, psychology, and printmaking at Penn State University and received a Masters of Arts in Teaching from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA.
Statement
I compulsively collect vignettes, minutiae, detritus, and fragments of things. I am a wandering spirit desperately in love with the forest and the sea, consumed by observing the world in its vastness and its atomicity. My work is formed layer by layer, a conjugation of my experiential accounts with the world in concrete forms.
For months I have been taking daily walks around Portland to gather bits of trash for an upcoming installation. A curator of sorts, I hunt for obscure items, brightly colored bits, repetitions of things, and obliterated fragments, all to be pinned to a gallery wall.
To glean at the dump is to expand beyond mere curatorial collection; to take discarded articles relegated to the periphery and transform them into art objects using skill and technique. I envision not only the destroyed remains of things like I find on my walks, the literal trash, but so many objects that people deem trash and discard without a second thought.
Residency: January 2016 - December 2016