About

Erica Gressman is a Miami-born, mixed Latinx queer artist working in Chicago who fuses sound art with performance. She received her BA from New College of Florida and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Performance in 2012. After Gressman received her MFA, she has worked as a Design Engineer and now has her own fabrication business, Rainbolt Productions, building architectural sculptures. These experiences have greatly influenced the heavy interactive structures that function as the sets for her compositions. Their thesis performance 'Wall of Skin' was featured in Performance Matters online journal (written by Dr. Sandra Ruiz), Teaching Contemporary Art, Barbed Magazine, Emergency Index Vol. 2, and featured on ‘La Estacion Gallery’ podcast. She has given lectures at institutions, such as Northwestern University, University of Illinois, University of Illinois CU, Royal Danish Art Academy, and New College of Florida. In 2019, they became an Illinois Arts Council Fellow after finishing Krannert Art Center's debut of her performance, 'Limbs'. She has performed at the Museum of the Contemporary Art Chicago, MANA Contemporary, Defibrillator Gallery, Pittsburgh’s VIA: Video/Music Festival, New York’s Grace Exhibition Space, Theater Factory in Malmo, Sweden, and Miami Art Center. Since the pandemic, Gressman has performed new live streamed works such as 'What to Watch in 2020' for Experimental Sound Studio's Quarantine Concert Series, along with 'Dissever' for Brooklyn's The Hive Art Community Re:Live Performance Lab online series. Currently, they are the drummer of the band, Fetishist, who just recorded an album with Steve Albini, while making experimental music videos. Gressman is also in the exploratory phase of creating a video art series that captures a synaesthetic experience with performance in a confined, isolated space- an echo chamber that loops amplified biological sounds.

Mixing genres, Gressman explores their hybridity through noise inspired by Miami’s underground punk scene and performances drawn from the bizarre culture clashes that punctuate daily life in Florida. They fuse sound art with performance practices to experiment with the body as technology amplified by spectacle. She builds her own theatrical sets, interactive electronic instruments, and costumes to create a synesthetic experience. They strive to translate sound and light using the body as a technological movement interface to create a cybernetic system that amplifies the abstract sentiments of a body evacuated of the human.

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