NEW YORK, NY, January 5th – Bill Hodges Gallery presents Erica Schreiner: Feminine Transgressions, an exhibition of performative, intimate feminist video art seen through Erica’s ethereal VHS lens. Erica brings to life ephemeral deconstructions of desire by experimenting with temporality, gender and organic sensuality. Through her allegorical storytelling, Erica shares her world where butterflies are eaten alive, where menstrual blood is drunk. In this place, Erica tears free from patriarchal suffocation and alchemizes dreams of pink flowering trees into reality. Through combined horror and beauty, she shows what is possible. With works that engage themes like addiction, ritual, and catharsis, Feminine Transgressions offers a portal through which viewers get to witness the surreal, nostalgic, blush-tinted magic of an artist’s feminal self-discovery. In her signature style of VHS filmmaking, Erica commands a sensibility of radical interiority, imbuing the imagery of her narrative videos with a timelessness that defies convention. The subject of Erica’s work flows through the abstracted landscape of home and boudoir. Subverting etiquette of social expectation, she uncovers the hidden power of her feminine body. Featuring five courageous films and five film stills, Feminine Transgressions, Erica’s second solo exhibition at Bill Hodges Gallery welcomes viewers to reconsider how gender can be lived, embodied, and deconstructed. In Erica’s videos, body movement and gestures become compulsive actions that paradoxically signify empowerment through their macabre and comical repetition. Furthermore, the body assumes a dominant role in demonstrating the link between the mind and the body itself, becoming the canvas through which the artist expresses herself.
Erica Schreiner has exhibited her work extensively throughout the course of her career both in the United States and internationally. She has completed more than 100 video works of performative art, two feature films, and several music videos. In 2021, Erica received a New York City Artist Corps Grant for her second feature film, The Special People. Her most recent work, Blue Transcendence, is screening at The New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative in February. Three of her films, Birth, Psychic Driving, and Tara are screening at Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin this October. To view excerpts from Erica’s videos, please visit http://www.youtube.com/analogcinema.