Torey Erin is a Minneapolis based interdisciplinary artist primarily working in moving image, sculpture, installation, ecology, and land art. Torey received her Bachelor’s of Fine Art and Master’s of Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota. Torey’s work amplifies environmental phenomena to create places where people may share their stories and co-create new art works. She has created a living participatory land artwork for the 4Ground Land Art Biennial titled Love Letters to the Earth, where she invited the community to discuss ecological grief and write devotions to earth on handmade seed paper to plant into a perennial garden. She proposes ways of re-imagining material approaches to art and landscape that serve human and non-human life, focusing on environmental change, empathy and relationality. During her most recent residency at Franconia Sculpture Park, she transformed one acre of turf grass into native prairie, inviting participants to seed the landscape by hand and dance the seeds into the ground. This intention is to connect people to landscape through ritual and body movement that will benefit non human species and soil quality for years to come.
Torey has exhibited at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Mirrorlab, Soo Visual Art Center, Company Projects, Public Functionary, Q2 Gallery, Rosalux Gallery, Yeah Maybe Project Space, FilmNorth, Gamut Gallery, and has an outdoor installation at Silverwood Park in Minnesota and Rabanus Park World Garden in Fargo, North Dakota; she has created costume and set/interior design at First Avenue, the Palace Theater, and the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis. Torey’s films have been featured in the Franconia Environmental Film screening, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Regis Center for Art, Duluth Film Festival, Trylon Cinema, Saltless Sea Cinema, Headwaters Film Festival, and Franconia Sculpture Park’s 5 Minute Film Festival. She is a recipient of the 4Ground Midwest Land Art Biennial (with support from Plains Art Museum and Franconia Sculpture Park), Joan MaCloed student Leadership Award (landscape architecture), 2020 Minnesota Artist Initiative Grant, Springboard for the Arts Hinge Artist Residency, Jo Tushie Fellowship, the Blacklock Sanctuary Fellowship, and is a Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar.
She is the current Franconia Sculpture Park inaugural Prairie Artist in Residence of 2024. She is a Research Fellow at the Minnesota Design Center working on the Empowering Small Minnesota Communities project and Design Assist, which include asset based community co-design, climate resilience, and systems thinking for long term development strategies.
She is also an adjunct instructor in architecture/landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota College of Design.
Toreyeb AT gmail DOT com