ERIN IMENA FALKER

Artist's Statement

​
Through my own explorations I have become very focused on the ideas of image making, image control, and the duality of identity. How complicit are we in the formation of our own public identities? What is the significance behind what we choose to hide and that which we choose to reveal? I am especially drawn to the relationship between these questions and contemporary African American identities and the performance of the self. To what extent do black performers willingly squash the openness, fluidity, and multiplicity of black identity to become a boxable digestible entity? And how complicit are we as an ethnically and racially distinct people in creating a narrow and reductive view of blackness?

 

The conceptual underpinnings of my work as an artist involve the African American experience and depictions of race in popular culture. In my work I explore image making and the cultural engine that drives and inspires raced performance. Dealing with the body as a site of meaning and a cultural signifier, as well as a symbol of current consumer culture allows for the exploration of the visualized, fetishized construction of celebrity culture and myth, as they relate to the black performing body. Another avenue that I am exploring is how racism and stereotype become woven into the everyday fabric of our lives, and how these messages become marketable, consumable, and insidiously quotidian. The product of my explorations has resulted in paintings, installations, video, and animation, which in turn are put into the world as media.