“I at all times needed to be a painter,” Erika Harrsch advised me over Zoom from her studio in Chilly Springs, New York. “I used to be 5 or 6 years outdated and already I knew I needed to be a painter.” Although portray is the nucleus of Harrsch’s apply, the artist has built-in a multidisciplinary strategy to her work. With upcoming initiatives at Instituto Cervantes in June and Museo de las Americas in October, the artist continues to make use of new media, sound, shifting picture, and sculpture right into a physique of labor that plumbs nuanced conversations round intercourse, need, gender, and fragility, all whereas embedding these narratives inside tales of migration and id.
The Mexico Metropolis-born artist has let her work and urge for food for exploration lead her all around the world, spending the previous 20 years in New York Metropolis earlier than shifting to Chilly Springs within the Hudson Valley, the place she now resides. When she first arrived in New York within the early 2000s, Harrsch’s work was met with skepticism and a level of sexist reductivity by the siloed market. “Commercially, it was troublesome. I used to be advised by nice galleries, ‘I don’t know methods to seize you,’” she mentioned, referring to the wide selection of her work. “They might inform me, ‘You achieve this many alternative issues — will we promote you as a painter, will we promote you as a photographer?’”
The vary of mediums Harrsch has used and continues to experiment with, coupled together with her richly tactile and opulently lush visible type, additionally led some to label the artist as merely making aesthetically pushed, “fairly” artwork. Her signature use of butterflies — particularly, changing the physique of the butterfly with photos of girls’s genitalia she photographed — was meant to function a automobile to inform tales about migration and motion, gender and need, but some had been fast to label it as “cute.”
“Initially of my profession, I obtained extra of that sense of ‘oh, cute,’ in regard to the butterflies and that strategy,” she mentioned. That each one modified when the artist created her set up, “United States of North America Passport,” an ongoing set up mission begun in 2009. “After I included the butterfly into the passport mission, the notion modified,” she shared. “I began listening to: ‘So the butterfly just isn’t solely the female, the genital, it’s political,’” shared Harrsch. “To which I mentioned, ‘It was at all times a political mission.’”
That’s to not say that even such an overtly political mission was instantly understood. “Folks then thought it was concerning the aesthetics of the wings of the butterflies themselves,” the artist says, “or the sweetness and the seduction of the genitalia.” The set up, which the artist has staged internationally, compresses the viewer right into a passport workplace. In that house, Harrsch interrogates the arbitrary borders between Canada and america, america and Mexico, increasing the territories into an imagined pan-continental nation: america of North America. Harrsch calls into query the North American Free Commerce Settlement signed in 1992, which permits for the transport of products throughout nationwide strains, illuminating the privileges skilled by inanimate supplies however not afforded to sure teams of individuals.
“I used the butterfly on the middle of the passport as an emblematic illustration of a unified North American continent,” Harrsch says, noting that the monarch butterfly’s migration sample spreads throughout the three neighboring international locations because the bugs search totally different territories to handle their life transitions and hibernation cycles. The work appears on the realities of immigration insurance policies, particularly the lived expertise of immigrant girls, particularly girls of coloration, who should, because the artist says, “reconstitute their very own id in accordance to the territory they’re dwelling in.”
In Harrsch’s present physique of labor, The Forest of Possible Ladies (2024) the artist embraces combined media and multidisciplinarity to create works that negate the premise of human supremacy over the pure world. The branch-like legs fitted with high-heeled sneakers mix portray, discovered objects, and natural supplies. The “tree girls,” because the artist calls them, are symbionts between plant, animal, and human. “I’m all in favour of creating speculative fantasies that reveal the complexity of how girls are perceived and the way they see the world,” says Harrsch. Within the work, the artist envisions moral interspecies cooperation in mutually consensual and helpful ecosystems, whereas additionally representing the empowerment of girls, gender fluidity, and sexuality as a portal to freedom.
Harrsch’s apply continues to construct upon itself, permitting her layered narratives and various mediums to evolve over time. “Every thing I’ve completed informs my portray, informs my images, informs my three-dimensional initiatives,” she says. That continued retrofitting and evolution of concepts has allowed the artist to have a nimbleness that feels sustained, highly effective, and frequently defiant of categorization.
