erika a roos | ルース・絵里花 (b. Yokohama) is a queer, Japanese, mixed-race, mixed-species artist, creature, and organism currently living & learning among the red tailed hawks, California buckwheat, black locusts, and coast live oak trees on the land of the Kumeyaay people.
Through analog, hybrid practices with 16mm film, site-sensitive installation, performance, risograph printmaking, and language, erika contends with how bodies live, die, move, and change, with attention to complex, interspecies, inter-material relationships.
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I am a movement-based artist working across experimental, analog modes of film, installation, performance, writing, and printmaking to study how bodies contain, materialize, and move through permutations of life and death, with emphasis on the generative, cyclical nature of disintegration and decay. I work with intangible materials including movement, darkness, light, and time to create layered, unstable gestures that are unfixed in form but residual in the body.
With attention to the physical and psychic space of a room, a page, a screen, or a stage, my practice is an ongoing study of how bodies of both earthly and spirit realms inhabit space, time, and form. Through the production of porous, fluid encounters of variable dimension and duration, my practice refuses fixedness and permanence.
Central to my practice is a contending with the inevitability and necessity of decomposition and loss. I am obsessed with unearthing that which emerges (only) when we release our hold on accumulation, preservation, and certainty.
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