Erin Cooney

THE FREE STATE OF AIR
in production

The Free State of Air is an activist video artwork that will be publicly projected onto significant corporate and industrial buildings and installations that play a key role in causing air pollution in fence-line and disproportionately BIPOC communities. The videos will depict performers speaking in interconnected monologues in subtitled American Sign Language (ASL), a visual language spoken by the deaf community comprised of hand and facial gestures. The use of ASL is about making the invisible visible, in this case the air. For example, the sign for air is to move one’s hands through the air, which depicts our material relationship with this material which is often conceived of as a void. The dialogues will touch on themes including health inequities and environmental racism. It will also examine the notion of the air as a commons and will pose several questions, such as, who owns the air? Why are corporations and industry free to pollute the air we all breathe and damage the ecologies within which we live? Do people and living organisms have the right to breathe clean air? Or is air a commodity to be bought and sold? Even more radical: should the air be considered an autonomous agent replete with its own set of rights? After all, air is a fundamental element underlying the ecologies we and all life depend on in order to live. In this way, doesn’t the air ‘own’ us?

East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice is a project partner and collaborator, as is Deaf West Theatre, the preeminent deaf theater in Los Angeles.

NOW A ROOM, NOW A LANDSCAPE
2020, 2-Channel video performance with sound, 23 minutes

Now a Room, Now a Landscape was made during Los Angeles’s March 2020 “Safer at Home” orders, which were imposed in response to the outbreak of COVID-19. The work is about walking, embodiment, point of view, and landscape. The space in which I walked, a temporary living situation that was prolonged due to COVID-19, was not my home. The furniture and objects in it did not belong to me, and yet, like others who were fortunate enough to be quarantining safely at home during this time, my experience of the physical world had been largely reduced to my domestic space. As a result, I developed a peculiar intimacy with the rooms depicted, as they became my near total landscape. In them, I used tape to create a single pathway that covered every scalable surface, including furniture, in a wall-to-wall labyrinth in which floor became ground, and couch, tables, and countertops became mountains to climb. The labyrinth is a means of taking a journey through a confined space, while simultaneously defamiliarizing an otherwise known environment. Creating and then walking a labyrinth within my personal domestic space was my way to engage with ground, path-making, infrastructure, and how the built environment determines experience.

BODY / SITE / SEEN
2019, Multimedia dance performance with original score, 20 minutes

BODY/SITE/SEEN is a multimedia dance performance that explores ideas related to embodiment, point of view, and the act of seeing. In the performance, the live-streams of cameras attached to the dancers' bodies are projected onto the walls of the performance space. The cameras capture intimate landscapes of the body itself, as well as the body in relation to the other dancers and the space the body occupies. BODY/SITE/SEEN is a meditation on the bounded nature of embodiment and the fractional incompleteness of point of view.

THE WAVES
2019, Immersive multi-channel video installation with sound, 60 minute loop

The Waves is comprised of 60 minutes of immersive video of ocean waves that were recorded during the golden hour preceding sunset. Surrounded by the waves, there is a four-sided, life-sized video construction on which I tell four versions of a story about a personal interaction with the waves. In each rendition, I tell exactly the same story, with exactly the same words, but I tell it with a different emotional affect each time. These include joy, anger, sadness, and fear. In the installation, the four stories are being told simultaneously. From up close and in front of a single screen, the audio of each rendition is clear and distinct, but from afar, the four audio streams intermingle and come across as a cacophony of human drama. When the story is finished, the four versions of myself fall silent together for a matter of minutes and only the sound of the waves can be heard. 

For me, this piece is about being humbled into one’s rightful place in relation to the natural world. I believe such a humbling is a necessary first step towards the realization that humans are embedded within nature, as opposed to being outside of it.

GRIEVE WITH ME
2019, single-channel video with sound, 14 minutes

In Grieve with me, the viewer hears a loud rainforest soundscape recorded from within Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest, in which the calling of the coquí frog is prominent. In the video, I read an article about the 4-fold collapse in insect life within El Yunque since the 1970s, which is having devastating effects on the ecologies of the forest, which includes birds and amphibians like the coquí frog. Then I put the article aside and take time to grieve. Over the course of the video, the soundscape fades to silence, and the colors dissolve to complete desaturation, reflecting the draining of life occurring in this place and several places across the globe due to the ecological devastation caused by polluting industrial economic systems and ideologies.

CLAIR DE LUNE, OCEAN’S VARIATION
Multi-channel video installation with audio, 2019

Clair de Lune, Ocean’s Variation is a speculative artwork that imagines the solitude of a spot of ocean somewhere as it experiences itself in relationship to the moon, when you’re not there to see it.

The piece was made by digitally passing the motion of ocean currents through the pitch and tempo of a recording of Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune, a composition which, for me, captures the experience of being utterly alone with oneself, with perhaps only the light of the moon as company or witness.