Erin McGean is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on collage, both analog and digital, as a means of reimagining found imagery and interrogating the ways identity is constructed, performed, and perceived. Working with vintage photographs, hand-cut fragments, digital manipulation, and custom-coded animations, she explores the intersections of memory, beauty, and the gaze in an increasingly mediated world. Her process often begins with physical materials, which are scanned, altered, and reassembled through layered systems that mimic the logic of code, repetition, and machine learning. The result is work that feels simultaneously archival and contemporary, tactile and technological.
Much of McGean’s recent work addresses the aesthetics of the female form, questioning how women are rendered—by the camera, by history, by algorithms—and how these images are consumed and reshaped in the digital age. By introducing movement through stop-motion or interactive code, she disrupts the stillness of the image, creating a sense of rhythm, rupture, and reassembly that echoes the fragmented nature of online identity.
Based in Ontario, Canada, McGean has exhibited her work both physically and online. She is interested in the tension between the handmade and the digital, the surface and the self, and how artistic labor persists in a culture increasingly shaped by automation.
