Erinn Springer captures the sometimes irreconcilable duality of existence in her intimate portraits of family, friends and strangers from rural Wisconsin, where her family has lived for seven generations.
Born in Dunn County – between Eau Claire and the Twin Cities – in 1993, Springer moved to New York to attend Parsons School of Design, where she studied communication design. Springer knits together the worlds of fine art and journalism, creating bodies of personal work, including her latest tracing along Lake Superior, while collaborating with writers to produce photo essays for publications such as The New York Times, Vogue and Le Monde.
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The artist returned to Wisconsin in 2019 after a death in her family and decided to stay. She took up tasks on the family farm, caring for the humans, animals and structures on the property while seeing her world with adult eyes.
Dormant Season is an ongoing series of Springer’s photography that grew out of her rural return. It became the foundation for a book published in 2023 and an exhibition that wrapped up this month at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. She was given more time to pursue the project with a late 2020 commission from the Times titled “How We Survive Winter.” Springer’s images show how her community navigates the annual seasonal slowdown, perhaps offering insights to viewers experiencing the isolation of a global lockdown.
Springer began the project without knowing exactly where it would lead. “For a long time, I felt that to talk about something, I had to really know what I’m talking about,” she says. “But I’ve begun to realize that not knowing, and accepting that I may never have answers but rather just experiences that explore the big questions of life, is actually much more interesting and valuable.”
In this tightly conceived body of work, humans are present in full or parts. Traces of them are found shivering in the wind on a laundry line. A picture of hands separating egg yolks from the whites creates a sense of crowded isolation. The four orbs are plopped unceremoniously into a bowl, like family members trapped together during a long, snowy winter.
But it is not just the dignity of humans that Springer explores, however, for animals are their coequals. We see cloistered homing pigeons flashing feathers for show and nest position; we see cows, cats and dogs trailing or corralling humans indoors and out. Springer avoids any moral commentary on the clash between a familial caring for animals and consuming them, respecting the intertwined closeness of farm folks to the land and its creatures.
The most elegant and eloquent images include a picture of two large white dogs on a moonlit field, with stars twinkling above them. Springer says she named the work Constellation “for the threads of family that connect the visual elements of the picture.” Perhaps only an insider could have captured a clutch of kids on a home-schooling break lounging on hay bales in a barn. Light streams in from a rosette of windows high on the wall. Springer celebrates the moment when this “cathedral of the prairie,” to quote painter Charles Demuth, lets in precious winter light to bless these children in a state of innocent grace.
While preparing for the MOWA exhibition, Springer’s family shared with her a cache of family photos from the late 19th century to the 1930s, including photos by her great-great-great aunt Stella Gould. These precious legacy documents illuminate what the artist calls her “generational memory,” connecting Springer to her ancestors who worked and played on the same land. She added a vitrine of these heirlooms to her show, another layer that grounds the artist in place.
Springer captures the present, but more forcibly, she points to the future. We are reminded of the clashing ideas we have about farm life, trapped between the Founding Fathers’ celebration of farmers transforming the land acre by acre to create a new empire, versus today’s reality, our agricultural areas dominated by industrial farming. Springer’s figures are heroic but outgunned in this battle of small family farm against big business.
This is the first exhibition of Dormant Season, and Springer has received feedback from friends and strangers who feel they can “see themselves” in the show. That’s meaningful at a time when the division between rural and urban, between sustainability and a food and land crisis, dominates the headlines.
These stresses weep out of the cracks of Springer’s weathered buildings and tilted spaces. She digs deeper than political commentary, instead claiming “loss, grief and renewal” as her themes. Everyone in this landscape knows how to use winter’s reprieve to recharge and consider what the future will bring. It is a message that resonates from rural Wisconsin to a country struggling to reclaim its equilibrium.
