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“My work’s subject matter and process of making is grounded in an embodied experience of place,” Erin O’Flynn says of her lens-based, intermedia practice. “I approach place as not just a site or a landscape, but as an environment with an embedded history and as place to experience the impacts of the past on the present.”
In her body of work titled Particular Attention, which comprised the artist’s thesis exhibition at Pratt earlier this year, revolves around New York’s histories of nuclear energy production. In photography and sculpture, she emphasizes a monochromatic palette—predominantly black-and-white—to point toward “the insidious nature of this history, and it’s often invisible or hidden environmental harm.”
Photographs like Treat Oak Site reference events from the past, in this case a monument on the site of an ancient oak tree, beneath which a Mohican chief, or sachem, known as Aepjen is said to have signed one of the first treaties with the Dutch in 1645. Another image, Hudson River Reserve Fleet Memorial, continues to explore metaphorical contrasts between past and present, the visible and the vanished.
In a cylindrical form in a piece titled It’s exhausting trying to explain things you can barely see, O’Flynn references a barrel of radioactive waste from Manhattan’s Chelsea district, which was buried and lost underground thousands of miles away in Washington state. “A guiding question for my practice, offered by theorist and feminist Silvia Federici, is: Can you see the land as a victim and be in solidarity with it?”
In 2025, O’Flynn’s work will be in a show in January at artist-run gallery Patient Info in Chicago, after which she’ll be heading to a residency at Vermont Studio Center. Find more of her work on her website and Instagram.
Work included in the artist’s Pratt MFA Photography Thesis, Particular Attention, curated by Jody Graf, in the Pratt Photograph Gallery, Brooklyn, May 2 to 10, 2024. All images © Erin O’Flynn.