VISCERALLY EXPRESSING THEMES: ERIN DEVINE

Why did you choose video as your medium for your piece? What are the unique possibilities and challenges that this medium offers?

My work is performative, whether live or in video.  Typically, I enact ambiguous gestures using my own body in the video format, and are based in visual metaphors of some central theme or narrative. For me, performance art is a very politicized form, full of potential to more viscerally express themes of disenfranchisement, or loss, or longing, because of its strong reliance upon the body as the central site of these experiences.  For this exhibition, I chose to work with a video installation, because I wanted to also address issues of how we experience memorialization, as well as who gets memorialized in history. I felt this could only occur best spatially because we are so accustomed to memorialization in the built form.

From your artist’s statement, it is clear that you draw inspiration from historical experiences of oppression and disenfranchisement. How has this piece made you think about current iterations of these issues?

In conceptualizing this piece, I was able to connect histories of oppression to ongoing conditions, as in the fraught relationship between the Church and women in Ireland, and to make parallels to present global concerns, such as the role of fundamentalist religious states and the disenfranchisement of women.  Celebrating the past accomplishments of women in history is a sort of generalized feminist legitimization of those women who have been overlooked by that history, and that would be one way of giving a platform to the women who fought in the Rising and have been left out of the memorialization of its heroes.  But to connect what they did to a more recent history, making parallels between taking up arms to taking up condoms as the Irish feminists did in the 70s, emphasizes a 100 year period of struggle for rights that are indelibly part of women’s bodies.  Both acts were extreme gestures of rebellion despite the oppression of the Church, and the point was not only to give attention to those acts but to question why these patriarchal structures or attitudes haven’t changed.