Austin Irving (born 1984) is an American contemporary artist and photographer.
Life
Irving was born in New York City in 1984. She is the daughter of film director David Irving and landscape designer Susan Irving. Her paternal grandparents are theater director Jules Irving and the actor Priscilla Pointer. She is the niece of the actor Amy Irving. In 2006, Irving graduated from the Tisch School Of The Arts at NYU with a BFA from the Department of Photography and Imaging. In 2017, she was the artist-in-residence at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. In 2019, she was an artist-in-residence at the Varda Artist Residency aboard the SS Vallejo, a historic house boat in Sausalito, California.
Career
Irving works with large format analog photography. She uses a Toyo view camera and shoots on 4x5 Kodak color negative. Her images are presented as large scale photographic prints. Her photographs explore liminality and metageography, anthropocentrism, and the tension between natural and man-made environments. Irving has stated that her photographic practice is motivated by the wish to find relief from the "extreme internal discomfort" of living with body dysmorphic disorder. Irving cites Thomas Demand, Bernd & Hilla Becher, MC Escher, René Magritte, Lynne Cohen, and James Turrell as artists whose work have impacted her practice.
She has been working on a photographic series entitled NOT AN EXIT (2007–present), which showcases real-world optical illusions created from narrow angles in functional hallways and doorways. These photographs have been called Escher-esque, a reference to M. C. Escher. The debut of this series at Wilding Cran Gallery was reviewed in The LA Times by art critic Leah Ollman.
Her series SHOW CAVES (2009–present) has received significant media and academic interest for its interrogation of the ethics and impact of ecotourism, specifically the concept of government and commercially operated show caves. As a result, Irving was asked to sit on a panel for a public forum on rural economies at Virginia Tech's annual conference for Appalachian Studies Association, where the socio-economic impact of commodifying rural arts, culture, environment, and heritage to create a tourist industry in rural Appalachia was debated. This series has also been featured on The Weather Channel, Yatzer, and in Wired Magazine. An image from this series won the Florida Museum of Photographic Art’s 2021 International Photography Competition.
In 2017, Irving's photographs from her NOT AN EXIT series were included in the exhibition Reimagining A Safe Space at NYU. The exhibition explored the notion of safe spaces, especially examples of and challenges to the concept. This series showcased real-world optical illusions created from narrow angles in functional hallways and doorways. Within the exhibition, the series was credited with providing context for the contested topic of safe spaces. In 2019, two works from NOT AN EXIT were also included in the third Every Woman Biennial in New York City curated by C. Finley, an answer to the Whitney Biennial which showcases diversity among contemporary female and queer artists.
Exhibitions
Upon graduating from NYU, Irving was selected to be a part of the SoHo Photo Gallery’s 12th Annual National Photo Competition in 2007 in lower Manhattan. In 2012, Irving created a visual essay of her SHOW CAVES series that was projected at The Pavilion during LOOK3’s sixth annual Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Virginia. LOOK3 was founded in 2006 by National Geographic photographer Michael Nichols and has been billed as "3 days of peace, love, and photography.” In 2013 and 2014, Irving’s work was included in the international shows After Dark I and After Dark II, respectively, at Greg Moon Gallery in Taos, New Mexico. In 2015, NOT AN EXIT was featured in The Interiors Collection by SeeMe and was shown at the fifth Annual Exposure Awards at Musé du Louvre, Paris.
In 2016, Irving's photographs from her NOT AN EXIT series were included in the exhibition Hong Kong: Identity + Illusion at LightStage Gallery, Hong Kong. This exhibition was a "photo and interactive performance art exhibition of Hong Kong-based artists exploring individual narratives of personal identity, 'self' across time and space and cities on this incessant journey to somewhere both routine and new, and illusions of light and being as told through a camera's lens, as captured if for an instant."