ERIN GLEASON

Born in Buffalo, aged in Philadelphia, and seasoned in Scotland, Australia, Greece, and New York City, a curiosity and love of place has been a constant inspiration since childhood. What began as a desire to "know" place has grown into a wider passion of exploring the art of knowledge. How do we know what we know? My work delves into how we experience various tugs in knowledge and truth – tugs between measurement and lived experience, thinking and feeling, the seen and unseen, the rational and the sensuous. I explore how these tugs play out in our relationships to time, language, the feminine, history/myth, and place.

Drawing from my current postgraduate research in philosophy and nearly 20 years working in design and architecture, I work in multiple mediums from drawing, photography, installation, and sculpture to public art, interactive events, writing, and curating. My artworks often fall somewhere in between process-based art, defining a feminist sublime, and spatial design. I often draw from the philosophies of Henri Bergson, Luce Irigaray, Donna Haraway, Andreas Weber, and Agnes Varda, and am often inspired by artworks from the Situationists, romantic landscape painters & photographers, and architectural traditions from around the world. Most recently, concepts of phenomenology, birth, and children's perspectives have entered my work.

Most of all, I strive to create what author Parker Palmer describes as “a third thing" — something that “allows us to hold challenging issues metaphorically, where they can’t devolve to the pro-or-con choices forced on us by conventional debate.” For me, this is what art is all about: creating a third thing that through its beauty, seduces us to pause, wonder, contemplate, and converse, embracing possibilities beyond "the way things are.”

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Based in NYC + Athens

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Follow on Instagram to see works in progress, fieldwork, and inspirations: @gleasonstudio

Recent:
Never Cross the Same River Twice (Parts I & II): Cultivating Embodied Futures, essay for the exhibition catalogue, "Never Cross the Same River Twice", curated by Ariana Kalliga and Kisito Assangni, Space52, Athens, 2021.

PhD Candidate: Philosophy, Art Theory & Aesthetics at IDSVA