Details
| First Name | Erika |
| Last Name | Choe |
| Username | erikac |
| Bio | Erika Choe is an interdisciplinary artist interested in preserving our humanness in a time of rapid technological innovation. Her work sits at the intersection of technology and bodies, expressed through unexpected forms ranging from performance, site-specific installation, video, and interactive sculpture. Erika earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2023, and her BA in Interdisciplinary Studies at University of Virginia in 2015. Her installation works have received Best of Schools Award by NYCxDESIGN at the ICFF + Wanted Design Festival in 2022, and been shortlisted for the 2023 Global Design Graduate Showcase in collaboration with Gucci. Her products have been selected by the MoMA Design Store for production, shortlisted for D&AD Future Impact Award, and featured on online publications like Haackster.io. Her choreographic pieces have been commissioned and selected by various platforms such as San Francisco Conservatory of Dance Residency, Chicago DanceChance Showcase, Charlottesville Ballet Company, and ACDA Gala Performances. As a movement artist, she has been invited to perform for Studio Drift’s EGO installation at the Shed in 2021. She has also performed with world-renowned choreographers such as Akram Khan, Alejandro Cerrudo and Yin Yue. As a strategic design lead, she has worked closely with startups, VC firms and creative agencies like New Lab-based company 10XBeta, Javits Center, Boscia, and more. Her work in the commercial realm has informed her deepening dedication to question the capitalist and exploitive nature of the systems we exist in. |
| Website | |
| Country of residence | United States (US) |
Statement
| Statement | I examine our humanness amidst our entanglement with technology and capitalism through a range of mediums such as performances, installations, video, writing, and objects. Interdisciplinary by nature, my work crosses perceptions of sound, sight, touch and taste to invite viewers to feel fully and experience intimately. I work with the materiality of the body to explore themes of care and connection. I thread in open-source technological tools to question, provoke, and reflect our knotted relationship with technology. My work is rooted in performance, either from myself as an artist or through an invitation for my audience to perform in interacting with my work. I search for the edges of our human experience, determined to discover its thresholds and potential for transformation. I aim to contrast ephemeral exchanges of a live performance with fossilized gestures in the form of tactile artifacts, paying close attention to the audience’s experience before, during and after my work. My process leans into the romanticism of everyday life, I bring together moments of stillness and drama into the same space to give life to a quiet story. I obsess over amplifying the beauty in the mundane and emphasizing on details I find worth rendering. I crack open typical forms for art making and apply a symbiotic approach to generate non-traditional ways of storytelling. These modes of expressions reveal isolated glitches in my reality that conjure a longing to break free of the systems we live in. My practice extends the work of hydrofeminism and critical post-humanism. I attribute this lens to my often displaced sense of belonging in discipline-specific workplaces and the racial biases I experience. This also informs my spirit of defiance against digital capitalism, transhumanism, and techno-patriarchy, and I take extra care in layering my responses to these themes into my work. More specifically, I endeavor to make work that asks the difficult questions we often shy away from. I seek to ask rather than solve. I also seek to engage with as many people from all walks of life to consider the very systems that commodifies us, as well as the blindspots we leave unaccounted for. I believe this dedication is necessitated and poignant in the hyper-technologized world we live in today. |