Erika Harrsch Mexico, 1970.
Born in Mexico City, Harrsch has lived in several cities throughout the country, as well as Italy, Germany, and Brazil; for the past fourteen years she has lived and worked in New York City. She has been defined as a multidisciplinary artist, employing traditional mediums along with new media and technologies to articulate her concepts and interests.
The formal aspects of her oeuvre and languages investigate diverse fields to achieve visual, multisensory, and interactive experiences: a comprehensive reflection about the body and identity, sexuality, desire, the space that defines us and the one we wish for, the limits and vertiginous freedom that lead to a continuous corporeal and ideological migration.
Harrsch’s solid background as a painter has been essential and visible in her aesthetic process, and her artwork is continually being filtered through images, the representation of the object, spaces, and colors; the work stems from experimentation and the processes themselves, and only later becomes articulated. These visual and formal processes are infused with multilayered references, a complex weave of the strata of meanings, which in turn make possible the extraction of multiple readings and narratives concerned with individual and cultural preoccupations, as well as critical social, political, and environmental issues.
For over six years she has included entomology research as part of her work, using butterflies as a metaphor for themes such as gender, identity, migration, nationality, and the relationship human beings have with their own nature and fragility.

For the past eight years her interdisciplinary practices have led to collaborations with well-known musicians and composers, including Philip Glass, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, Claire Chase, Paola Prestini, and Maya Beiser, among others.
Erika Harrsch has been selected to particjpate in the Fokus-Lodz Biennale, Lodz, Polonia, 2010; 798 Biennale, Beijing, China, 2009; International Media Art Biennale, Seoul, South Korea, 2008; Fotofest Biennial, Houston, Texas, 2008; as well as the 6th and 7th FEMSA-Monterrey Biennial, Mexico, in 2003 and 2005.
Her work has been shown in galleries, festivals, and international artistic residencies, as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), Museo del Barrio (New York City), Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, Nevada), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY), Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, Washington), in the United States; Göteborg Konstmuseum, Sweden; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (Nuevo León) and Museo de la Ciudad (Querétaro), in Mexico.
Her work is included in numerous international public and private collections, including the Musée de la Photographie in Belgium, and Eaton Corporation, Ford Foundation and Fidelity Corporation in the United States.
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Harrsh’s work, thematically aligned with the butterfly, share content based on migration and the surrounding circumstances that define identity, nationality and global mobility. Departing from these projects, she has further elaborated on the complexity of the migratory experience, to approach immigration reforms and the recontextualization of the physical borders.
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Imagos
The Butterfly as a visual metaphor for woman, raise issues about the transforming experiences of migration, sexuality, individuality and values as they relate to ethnic diversity and cultural and ideological heritage.
The project explores how each immigrant woman preserved the core of her identity regardless of recontextualizing herself within a new country.
Different species of Lepidoptera merged with human female genitalia. A different woman’s vulva is at the center of the wings. Each woman is from the same country of origin as the butterfly in which is fused.
A new form of portraiture that reveals the most private features while the recognizable physiognomy and
identity of each woman remain unidentified.