Show opens: May 2nd, 2025, 5-9pm
Show runs: May 1st-23rd
Artist Statement: As a visual artist, I am interested in imagery that both embraces, but denies... entices yet disgusts. I find, from personal observation and lived experience, that the vile and the exquisite are a cyclical continuum that encompasses all of human experience. I strive to bring visual representation to not merely human events (sex, death, birth, consumption), but to reveal the ephemeral, un-mentionable quality of such experiences.
While it is true that these events are part of every being's existence, it would be wrong to assume the banality of such incidents. From birth to death, these events mold the individualistic nature of every human. However, it is also because of these shared experiences that one can identify with another outside of the self. Sex, death, birth, and consumption are not exclusive events encapsulated in time, but temporal experiences that ebb and flow. My artwork is a testament to this fact of existence in a cycle.
Life is not a binary experience. One does not simply experience happy/sad or calm/angry. Human experience is complex, subtle, and above all fleeting. My work strives to embody this, and reflect this essence back upon the viewer. By enacting the grotesque realities of life within the pictorial beauty of the hyper natural, I hope to encapsulate the transient idea of shared humanity.
Artist Bio: Erin Robinson Grant is a new media artist currently residing in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Indiana, Grant earned her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Indiana University. She has also attended the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia and The Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland. Her work deals with birth, death, and our abject responses to it. She explores these themes through an amalgamation of video, animation, drawing, installation, performance, and computer interaction. Grant has exhibited nationally at The Kinsey Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Cleveland. Her collaborative video piece A Hunger Artist was chosen to be on the Shortlist of the first Guggenheim/You Tube Biennial and was featured in the exhibition Un/Conscious Bent at the Yellowstone Art Museum. Grant has exhibited at a variety of venues in the Northwest including Gallery 114, University of Portland, the Umpqua Valley Arts Center, Blackfish Gallery, PUNCH Projects, The Arts Center, Verum Ultimum, Lower Columbia College, and Central Washington University.