Erika Harrsch Solo Exhibition at ArtGate Gallery in NY. March 1st till 30th, 2012

Download Exhibition Catalog. Text excerp from Richard Vine's essasy

Inverted Sky is a multimedia project consisting in paintings, drawings, three-dimensional elements, installation, flying kites, and video. Erika Harrsch's solo show transforms ArtGate Gallery into a laboratory for thought on the joys and challenges that emerge from the intertwining of our lives in one global community. The thought-provoking installations, kites, entomological boxes, and paintings of Inverted Sky create a weave of intersecting perspectives: lives of individuals in nature, scientific calculation, commerce and trade, and questions of global ethics. The exhibition invites the spectator to reflect, as the animated fluttering of paper butterflies in the installation Cashcube beckon viewers inside to witness species of currency butterflies. Some of these monetized butterflies are pinned etymologically as extinct specimens ready for inspection. Others migrate across paintings, sometimes freely and unpredictably, at other times suffering from the effects of economic choices on the natural environment.

Harrsch invites us to consider how our lives are enmeshed in relations of interdependency. The artworks in this exhibition depict a weave of parallel paths and interdependent dimensions that open up alternative outcomes in the search for new utopias. Will the precision of scientific objectification finally pin unique individuals into lifelessness? Both the strength of a surrealist-like humor and the brilliantly colored species of butterfly-currencies suggest otherwise: nature and its interdependent individuals, no matter how much late-modern technicians predict, measure, and manage. The professional grade etymological butterfly boxes containing extinct European currencies -- Papilionnumismia Ephemerae Europeae -- are surely sites of reflection. Delicate and free flutterings of fragile living individuals may yet create a promising inversion, where unreachable, cloud-like imaginings float down to earth and transform a commodified environment back into an incarnate atmosphere open to creativity. In the new painting Twist, butterflies maneuver in an openness of air with uncharted possibilities. The sky is alive and there is an inversion at play.