Erin Wilkerson

Erin Wilkerson giving an artist talk on "Invasive Species" for Dokumentar Filmwoche 2023.
Photo by Travis Wilkerson

Erin Wilkerson works to expand the definition of invasive species beyond the botanical and zoological, facilitating an investigation into anti-colonial methodologies. This began with her vendetta against the lawn as a vestige of early colonial expansion and advocacy for removal in favor of indigenous plants and urban farming, while practicing landscape architecture in Los Angeles, and has since expanded into collage, painting, photography, and film.

Film still from, "The Scents that Carry Through Walls", by Erin Wilkerson

Growing up in proximity to the US/Mexico border, her work investigates imposed boundaries and liminal spaces, work which has an expanded geopolitical understanding into the roots of early colonial expansion, as she has now lived in Asia and Europe as well. Her personal (dis)orientations are relfected in her work.

From the collage series, "Objective Decay" (1 of 7), an assembalge of destroyed landscapes with classical depictions of women, by Erin Wilkerson

She aims to establish a framework for radical generosity, and looks towards nature, practice, and indigenous ontology to address the gaps in, and the urgent precarity created by, the western theory of the universal and a human-centric mode of being.

Still of the Wilkerson family at Rocky Flats, from the film, "Nuclear Family", by Erin and Travis Wilkerson

This work asserts that all landscapes are political and that kinship and sympoiesis have the potential to prevent mass extinction through deep and attentive listening, and the curation, collection, and creation of counter-archive. Attempting to reposition our current global trajectory, “Invasive Species” pleads for not just the reconsideration of future, but for future itself.