Dimensions

In the fall of 2010, just a few months before the country erupted in civil war, Erika Harrsch exhibited her artwork in Syria. The show featured work from her Imagos series, photographs of women’s genitals seamlessly Photoshopped between the wings of butterflies. Harrsch says she likes using butterflies in her work because they can be “a metaphor for talking about identity and migration.” Each woman and each butterfly had the some country of origin. Harrsch has shown this series in several countries, and every country has reacted differently. In Syria, the work was confiscated.

Initially, the Syrian government censors approved the work—presumably not acknowledging the content out of fear of indicting themselves as sexually minded—or perhaps they’re just so unfamiliar with female genitalia that they didn’t recognize it when it was staring them in the face. Eventually, some women complained about the art and reported it to the Ministry of Culture, which quickly seized the work.

Harrsch was born in Mexico City, has lived and worked in Germany, Italy and Brazil, and has been based in New York for 12 years. She’s currently the first ever semester-long visiting artist in residence at the University of Nevada, Reno’s art department. She’s co-teaching with Joe DeLappe a class on art in public spaces, and providing critiques for the student artists. She’ll have a solo exhibition at the university’s Artspace Gallery in the West Street Market opening April 3.

Additionally, Harrsch will present her multimedia performance event “Bodymaps” at the Nightingale Concert Hall on April 8, with collaborators composer Paola Prestini and former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler. Harrsch created a visual timeline of images—primarily her paintings, drawings and photographs—and gave it to the composer, who composed music to accompany the timeline. Then, Harrsch created videos and animations of the images in the timeline set to the music. A primary theme of “Bodymaps” is the human body, and the life experiences that can be read on a body, what Harrsch describes as a “graphic map that shows the life.”

“It was a beautiful collaboration process,” says Harrsch. “Whatever was created, either in terms of visuals or music, we kept on transforming it.”

The piece premiered at New York’s Whitney Museum in 2007, and has been presented at many different venues and festivals. The response to the piece has been so positive that many composers have approached Harrsch about collaborating, including Philip Glass, one of the most prestigious composers in contemporary music.

In the Artspace Gallery, Harrsch will be presenting videos from another large multimedia work, “Room 35.” For that piece, she again worked with composer Prestini and a different cellist, Maya Beiser. “Room 35” is partly inspired by Nam June Paik’s famous 1970s sculpture “TV Cello,” a cello made of stacked televisions.

“The instrument was not pristine and successful in terms of sound, it was more like a sculpture that was played,” says Harrsch of Paik’s piece. “In this case, since I was collaborating with some of the top musicians in the country, I wasn’t going to compromise their performance.”

She worked with an LED sign designer who builds signs for Times Square advertisements to build a cello with LED displays that could be integrated into her videos and animations. The “Room 35” video depicts human bodies in intimate embraces, with different images juxtaposed on them and in the negative space between them.

Harrsch views her large-scale multidisciplinary work, which incorporates video, music, photography, drawing and painting—as rooted in collage.

“We live in a world that gets informed by so many different things, and we get informed by so many different things,” she says. “We are so many different things at the same time. We’re not unilateral or linear. We’re multidimensional.”