I am a visual artist working across sculpture, video, photography, installation and artist books to examine cultural relationships to land and the environment. My work considers landscape and place as a network of biological, material, and sociopolitical entanglements, to investigate cultural memory, value systems, and national mythmaking.
A documentary ethos drives my practice. Grounded in place-based research and observation, I tell stories through multi-media collage: a site’s daily rhythms, materials, ecosystems, infrastructure, and idiosyncrasies form layered narratives. I combine found materials and media with handmade objects, printed matter, short films, and photographs.
My work begins with the power of particulars: collisions among human actors, past and present, material histories, and natural systems. I’m drawn to breakdown: when cultural values and systems of logic fail, reveal themselves, or mutate – moments when specific details expose larger questions of paradox, ephemerality, contradiction, power and impermanence.
Collaboration beyond art spaces is central to my process. I have worked with biologists, environmental activists, historians, and community radio to produce public projects, artist books, and time-based gallery works. My projects have examined a 19th c. utopian community’s struggle to define itself and challenges faced by its contemporary stewards (Maintaining Utopia, 2018–2019), discussions of “invasive species” with scientists amid climate change, migration, and xenophobic and nativist policy (Refuge, 2019 and Tree News No. 5, Fall 2024), and community members monitoring pollution emissions in face of environmental deregulation (Obscuring Power, 2023).
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Erin Mallea (b. 1990) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring what relationships to land, time, and the environment reveal about contemporary value-systems and sociopolitical conditions. Born and raised in Idaho, her practice is influenced by her family history: former farmers, miners, and sheep-herders that left remote mountains, farms, and now ghost towns in response to interconnected environmental, economic, and political crises.
Erin has exhibited and screened work in community gardens, over the air-waves, and at galleries, museums, and artist-run spaces including the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Laband Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Miller ICA, Pittsburgh, PA; Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID; and Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR. She has worked with biologists, historians, environmental justice activists, and family members to develop publications, public projects and layered, time-based installations. She currently produces Tree News, a periodical focused on contemporary art, ecology, and environmental justice. She received her BA from Loyola Marymount University and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Erin is based in Pennsylvania, where she is an Assistant Professor of Art at the Pennsylvania State University.