By: Diane Vivona
Claire Harvey, Next to Nothing, 2009. Installation at Lombard-Freid Projects.
Claire Harvey is a young artist with keen observation skills and a fascination with social structures. Her work focuses as much on the individual figure as on groups and crowds, and highlights the fragile as well as playful shifts between these two identities. Lombard-Freid Projects is currently presenting Harvey’s first solo show in the US, a welcome introduction to the artist following Harvey's recent success in Europe.
Low-tech is at the core of Harvey’s aesthetic. She works with materials like scotch tape, overhead projectors, glass slides, and blu-tack as a means to create awareness of formal aspects of scale, space, and line as they occur in daily actions and activities. A simple manipulation like mounting a glass slide with blu-tack and placing the blue blob so that it finishes the image painted on the front side of the slide, shifts the value of the material from practical to figurative.
Harvey’s tactics are often borrowed from earlier modes of representation. She uses 18th century camera obscura techniques to create magical surprises, obscuring or revealing space like a magician. She appropriates compositional structures directly from classic film genres, using the cinematic shadows developed for film noir and pulling images directly from these1940s films for her drawings and paintings. Her consistent reliance on simplicity supports the work's emotional resonance and underlying nostalgia. One of her best tricks is to create a sense of longing by having blank canvases and transparencies mixed in with those that are filled. These frames of absence allow each viewer to pine for something or someone that could be there, pulling from individual memory banks to expand the work’s potential and meaning.
The main room of Lombard-Freid Harvey brought together 14 separate works into one site-specific installation, Next to Nothing (2009)*. Delicate drawings are projected onto the wall, each figure seemingly plucked from a different scenario and many in mid-activity. Fully realized canvases mix in with the projections, and the figures, whether the background is a blank wall or an oil covered canvas, appear equally isolated. They are lone figures in nondescript actions. Unexpectedly, they also appear as part of a community.
Harvey’s familiar strangers are there to be seen but also are a group that the viewer becomes a part of, as walking into the installation effects a display of the viewer’s shadow. Viewing becomes active as the shadow figures may interrupt an image or obscure it completely. Occasionally, a shadow of another viewer passes and, by obscuring one image, reveals a figure formerly hidden. The viewing voyeurs turn into participants and quickly the representation of strangers includes you and the person next to you.
Untitled (Easily Removable) (2009) is remarkable in its depiction of Harvey’s trust in the ephemeral. Over 100 figures, each less than an inch high, are painted onto pieces of transparent tape and placed directly onto the wall. This work was exhibited at the Tate Modern’s Member Room from July 2007–March 2008 and, amazingly, some of the work survived from their walls to Lombard-Freid’s. Others were recreated. All the figures, most in small groups, face away from the viewer. Each group attends to a collective gaze, as if waiting for a bus or observing fireworks. By looking at them, the viewer joins the crowd, and the person behind who gazes joins in as well. It is another trick that Harvey employs – forcing a tension between the passive and the active gaze - and in so doing highlighting the act of looking itself.
Harvey’s brilliance is in representing moments that are non-glorious as well as non-contemplative. These are positions that are always there and rarely noticed, and by repeating them over and over again with multiple figures, in large and minute renderings, she gives them importance and mass. By capturing the unseen in-between acts or gestures that make up a life, she creates a representation of life and loss.
Having recently completed a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, academic persuasions and historical influences are ripe in Harvey’s current work. Equally present is her passionate ability to create an intimacy among strangers. The work could be seen as visually updating the sentiment projected in a line from the 1944 film The Phantom Lady, “No names, no addresses. Just companions for the evening.”
* Note: each work may be purchased separately
“Claire Harvey: Next to Nothing” at Lombard-Freid Projects runs through June 27, 2009.
Lombard-Freid Projects
531
Take the A, C or E train to 23rd Street and/or the M23 bus to 23rd and 10th Avenue
Gallery Hours: Tues – Sat, 10 am - 6 pm
Gallery Website: www.lombard-freid.com
Sounds like a really interesting show, particularly the use of visual tricks such as the camera obscura techniques.
Posted by: Sarah B. | June 30, 2009 at 10:08 AM