Erin Hinz
Artist Statement

In my work I seek to explore sexuality as a behavioral practice. With the understanding that gender is performative and culturally constructed, expressions of sexual practice have equally an important social function. I am interested in challenging the notion of gender as a binary relationship, with its hidden political agenda, which purports to describe the world, while actually prescribing. This assumption of a preexisting identity is used to police behavior. The claim for lucidity in gender should be critically analyzed. Who creates this “clear” view of gender and whose interests does it serve? I am interested in some of the ways this conception of gendered sexual practice as culturally constructed overthrows its naturalized and ostensibly appropriate heteronormative definition.

I address this subject by exploring the contested relationship between humans and nature. In considering the history of feminist theory in regards to this relationship, many people argued that women have been considered as part of nature, like animals, while men have been tamers and controllers of nature, sort of outside of it. For instance, art historical masculine relationships with nature are often represented by bloody tension between the natural world and the creative genius of man while the feminine relationship is represented by passive submission. My goal is not to reinforce this conception but rather to subvert and recontextualize it disassociated from past binary structures. Because of the positive changes in culture, I am able to investigate a territory not oppressed with the burdens of the past but one constructed outside the parameters of what is ostensibly a shared conception of gendered sexuality. This androgynous erogenous zone is a place where nature becomes culture, public becomes private, and the meanings of gender are ambivalent and contradictory.

By mashing together natural and cultural references with the body I attempt to give visual form to sensation. Some of the imagery I use is often read as representing submissive, gentle and sweet femininity; however, I combine these symbols with uninhibited bodily activities. In my most recent paintings I play with scale and perspective to invite the viewer to perceive the environments as their own. In other works I portray the female body as a trippy humorous monster in an effort to confuse ostensibly appropriate definitions of femaleness. In the end, I strive to navigate a sense of being within a world where perceived forms of gendered sensuality are taken for granted and roles are always already. Instead I see the body as a construction of a shared language, as a place with an extraordinary potential for social, political, and symbolic change.