e a r t h f r u i t 

erika is a dancer & experimental video artist
currently based on earth.

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statement

i am a movement-based artist working across experimental modes of performance, installation, video, film, and printmaking to study how bodies contain, materialize, and move through permutations of life and death, with emphasis on disintegration. i work with intangible materials including movement, light, and time to create layered, unstable gestures that are unfixed in form but residual in the body. 

i create afterimages. 

With attention to the physical and psychic space of a room, a page, a screen, or a stage, my practice is an ongoing inquiry into the ways that bodies leak, spill, and extend out beyond themselves.

i use abstraction, distillation, and obfuscation to impress bodily movement onto surfaces that are unstable, disappearing, and unpredictable. i choreograph not by organizing of a sequence of gestures within a realtime rehearsal process, but through the careful, yet organic, manipulation of movement mediated by a lens. Through the production of porous, fluid encounters of variable dimension and duration, my installation practice refuses fixedness and permanence.

Central to my practice is a contending-with the inevitability — and necessity — of decomposition and of loss. i am obsessed with unearthing that which emerges (only) when we release our hold on accumulation, preservation, and certainty. 

My work engages with how “the surfaces of bodies 'surface' as an effect of the impressions left by others,” as queer feminist theorist Sara Ahmed writes in Cultural Politics of Emotion. What do histories of the self, and histories of place, impress upon us through (our) bodily movements, and how? How do we translate and transfer these impressions to one another, with and without touch?




bio 

erika is a queer, mixed-race, mixed-species artist, dancer, and organism born in japan, raised in southern california, and shaped by chicago, st. louis, pittsburgh, and new york. Through experimental film, installation, performance, and printed matter, erika contends with how bodies move, especially in relationship to disintegration and decomposition. 

erika is a former dancer with companies and independent choreographers in St. Louis, Missouri. 

They have performed and shown work at LAKE Studios Berlin, Kemper Art Museum (St. Louis), St. Louis Art Museum, Bread + Salt (San Diego), and Working Title (San Diego), among others.