I paint chaotic and dystopian domestic scenes. In surreal and crowded spaces women and children gesture as if from a medieval illuminated manuscript, or an Old Master like Bosch or Michelangelo. I choreograph powerful female protagonists and situate them in new imaginary realms to challenge domestic legacies that make women and mothers invisible.
Richly textured compositions use the fluidity of dripped bitumen with oil colour to create dynamic networks or patterns of ambiguous realism. The painting process is textual and performative, bodily creating figures that are excessive yet relatable. Small, cherubic, troublesome children embroil us in a palimpsest of narratives that question historical hierarchies and power structures.
My practice aims to excavate lived experience and initiate new conversations about value. Art is a space to open up cultural and social signification and ask for change.
Distanced Domestic exhibition by co.curation, London
I’ve been a working artist, curator, community activist and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and lectures. My practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. I’ve operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. I’m forever inspired by the rebel queers, renegade witches, and other dyke moms I run with, and bound to many brilliant artists, activists, spell-casters and healers. For many years I made performances that drew from my own experiences of trauma and transformation, intimacy and motherhood. More recently, I’ve experienced a shift in my practice, where my attention has turned to wider theoretical questions about the nature of performance itself to ask questions about when, where, how we perform - in theatres and galleries, on social media, and in our everyday lives.
Joy Christiansen Erb is a contemporary photographer and artist whose creative research explores themes such as memory, identity, and storytelling. Her most recent body of work explores the subjects of motherhood and family. This body of work is an autobiographical journey examining the lives of her family and her domestic space. The images included in the series document both the struggles and triumphs of everyday life.
Her photography has gained recognition through regional and national exhibitions and lectures as well as a 2015 Ohio Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Recent and upcoming solo exhibition venues include the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Center for the Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, Peoria Arts Guild and the Galveston Arts Center. Recent group exhibitions include Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, OR, the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. Her artwork has also been highlighted in a variety of publications including two notable textbooks. A portfolio of her most recent work is housed at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as a part of the Midwest Photographers Project in Chicago, IL.
She currently resides in Youngstown, Ohio, where she is an Associate Professor of Photography at Youngstown State University. She received her B.F.A. from Miami University, Oxford, OH and her M.F.A. from Texas Woman’s University.
I dye and print textiles for improvisational quilts and wall hangings. I layer experimental print and dye techniques one on top of another to create richly textured, complex surfaces. I sometimes combine printed fabric with family textiles and clothing to make collaged art quilts that reference the body, domesticity, and memory. I often start with an abstract idea or emotional state. I print and dye then cut, piece, and re-cut my materials until I find a combination that elicits the emotional state or idea I am interested in exploring. I do not have a sense of the finished design before I begin, but instead know what techniques I want to use or the constraints I will apply. I am most interested in techniques that borrow from multiple disciplines, dancing on the edge of printmaking/surface design, silkscreen/monotype, quilting/embroidery, artistic voice/chance, etc.
The title for this project comes from an old book I bought while I was pregnant. The book is filled with illustrations of women doing stretches and exercises, with ergonomic suggestions for housework and childcare. I found it a little bit helpful, mostly irrelevant. It didn’t do much to alleviate the chronic pelvic pain that started in my second trimester or the “new mother’s tendonitis” I developed when my son was five months old and almost 20lbs. The biggest impact the book has had was to help articulate the new chapter I find myself in, the “Childbearing Years.” As a culture, we focus on pregnancy as a time of change, but it is only the beginning.
Since becoming a parent, the boundaries of my studio practice and life have become evermore fluid. To continue making work, I have to be flexible. I have to practice dropping one thing in order to quickly transition to something utterly different, and most of all I must surrender to circumstance.