erika harrsch: Moving in the borderlands

Erika Harrsch: Moving in the Borderlands investigates the artist’s work in the context of the border and issues of migration, immigration, and their various impacts on people, the land, and culture.  Harrsch’s work will redress the notion of connectivity threading together works the artist has created over time, giving space to both the narrative frameworks of each work as well as how they sit together to form a meta narrative. 

Entering the exhibition, you encounter United States of North America Passport; an installation which compresses the viewer into a passport office. However, in this passport office Harrsch interrogates the arbitrary borders between the Canada and the United States, the United States and Mexico – expanding the territories into an imagined United States of North America. In this, Harrsch calls into question the North American Free Trade Agreement – which allows for the transport of goods across national lines – privileges, however, not afforded to people. 

Dissecting the exhibition into two halves is a fiber installation, Shrouded Sky, that simulates the bifurcation of the border wall. This work, made in collaboration with students from Idyllwild Arts Academy illustrates the ominous imposition of the wall as well as illuminates its porosity. The work, while approaching it, looms over the viewer, stained with oxide colored paint – however, upon moving closer – glimpses of sky and light emerge – inviting the viewer to pass through the wall and emerge on the other side to discover Eros Thanatos and Currency Butterflies – two installations hinged on the monarch butterfly and its intrepid migration between Canada and México. 

The exhibition looks at hospitality; what that means and how it means in the context of transnational movement, knowledge systems, cultural identity, community, and separation through the intersection of civilizations. Harrsch confronts issues effecting and affecting people in the current age, histories that have informed these narratives, and looks for connection points and gateways of understanding.

- Erin Joyce, Guest Curator

  • Erika Harrsch is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist; she was born and raised in Mexico City, and has lived in Italy, Germany, and Brazil. Her pieces are infused with multilayered references and narratives concerned with individual and cultural preoccupations, as well as critical political and environmental issues.

    For Harrsch, migrating is an existential and creative necessity. She combines the art, science, and politics of human and animal migration through the metaphor of the monarch butterfly, whose migratory route and very existence are connected to human concerns and actions. For years she has followed the migration patterns of these fascinating creatures and has frequently travelled back and forth across the US-Mexico border. Her voyages, however, require a passport and are regulated by border patrol; she cannot transcend the border like the monarch butterfly.

    Harrsch’s work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions, including shows at the Denver Art Museum (Denver, Colorado), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, Massachusetts), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City, New York), Museo del Barrio (New York City, New York), Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, Nevada), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, Connecticut), Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, New York), Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, Washington), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro (Santiago de Querétaro, México), Göteborg Konstmuseum (Gothenburg, Sweden), Musée de la Photographie (Charleroi, Belgium), and Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea), among others.

  • Erin Joyce is a curator and scholar of contemporary art and has organized over 35 solo and group exhibitions for museums, galleries, and project spaces across the United States including Between Beauty and Decay (Artspace New Haven, 2017), Still Life No. 3: Raven Chacon (Heard Museum 2019), Erika Harrsch: Moving in the Borderlands (Idyllwild Arts Foundation, 2022), and Crafting Resistance (Arizona State University Art Museum, 2023), and forthcoming exhibitions at the Sun Valley Museum of Art (2025). In addition to her curatorial practice, Joyce is a frequent contributor to Hyperallergic, and has had writing featured in Salon, Selvedge Magazine, Canvas Magazine, SHFT, Art Wednesday, Native American Art Magazine, GOOD Magazine, Southwest Contemporary, NPR Art and Seek, and a recent essay in Digging Earth: Extractivism and Resistance on Indigenous Lands of the Americas (Ethics International Press). She was a 2019 nominee and a 2023 winner of the Rabkin Prize for arts journalism from The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. 

    Joyce’s work has garnered attention from publications and media outlets including Vogue Magazine, The New York Times, The Economist, The Art Newspaper, New York Magazine, Forbes Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic, Widewalls, and The Queens Chronicle. She has lectured on contemporary art and politics at venues such as the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, Connecticut), the School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Fire Station Artist Studios (Dublin, Ireland), College of Charleston (Charleston, South Carolina), Heard Museum (Phoenix, Arizona), University of New Mexico (Albuquerque, New Mexico), Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff, Arizona), Idyllwild Arts Foundation (Idyllwild, California), Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona), Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, Arizona), Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, Arizona), Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, Arizona), University of North Texas (Denton, Texas), and Artspace New Haven (New Haven, Connecticut). Joyce holds a Bachelor of Arts in the History of Art from the University of North Texas, studied contemporary art at Sotheby's Institute of Art, London, and received a Master of Arts in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University. Joyce is a member of the faculty in the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and currently serves as the Vice President of Public Affairs for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Joyce lives and works in Phoenix.

Dates
September 30-October 27, 2022

Location
Idyllwild Arts (Idyllwild, CA)

Curated by
Erin Joyce

Oversaw
Exhibition installation; lighting and labels; artist communications and loan agreement, shipping; reception and artist/curator talk; photo-documentation.