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Since
the 1990's, Williamsburg painter Ellen Harvey has been charming us
with her intellectual take on mimesis. She began with
reproductions of everyday objects - personal ID cards, pants,
shirts - clever riffs on everyday objects and how they are
perceived. She painted dozens of similar items and also
created variations on a theme as in the same pair of jeans painted
different sizes and from different angles. Harvey's
obsession reached its apogee when she reproduced paintings from
the Whitney's permanent collection in miniature at the Altria
gallery in 2001.
We
were even more convinced of Harvey's talent when she spent the
better part of three years illicitly tagging random urban surfaces
such as post boxes and subway girders with forty miniature
oval-shaped romantic European and Hudson River School
landscapes. The English-born Harvard graduate documented
these efforts in her first art book, the wry New York
Beautification Project.
At
the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Harvey presented Museum of Failure:
Collection of Impossible Subjects and Invisible Self-Portraits,
a contemporary hall of mirrors which included empty frames of
different sizes and shapes, some cut out to provide views of the
rooms beyond. Down the street at the Armory, at 100
Biennale Visitors Immortalized, she exchanged a 15-minute
portrait for a critique of her performance. For her efforts,
Harvey was rewarded with a Best in Show.
In
some of her mixed media self-portraits in Museum of Failure
Harvey's face is obscured by a camera flash. The artist
cleverly implies that her true subject may not be mimesis itself
but the ultimate futility of the artist's attempt to live up to an
idealized image of an object or self. If as Shelley
observed, poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it
distorts, then perhaps art is a mirror which necessarily distorts
that which it makes beautiful.
Private
Collections, which includes recent pieces as well as
selections from Harvey's Museum of Failure, is currently on
show at Philadelphia's Locks Gallery through December 13.
Visit:
Private
Collections, Locks Gallery
Buy:
Ellen
Harvey, Luxe
Gallery
Discover:
New
York Beautification Project
Tags:
art
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