Ellen Harvey
[1][2][3] She frequently pairs traditional representational vocabularies and genres (landscape, portraiture) with seemingly antithetical postmodern strategies, such as institutional critique, appropriation, mapping and pastiche.
[1][4][5][6] Her work examines such themes as art as a mirror, interactions between built environment and landscape, ruins and the Picturesque aesthetic, and cultural and economic relationships between museums, artists and publics.
[27][26] She attended Harvard College (AB, History and Literature, 1989) and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin in Germany (1990, no degree), before earning a JD from the Yale Law School in 1993.
[43][44][45][27] In reviews, The New York Times described these works as "hit-and-run pastoral scenes"[43] that were painted with "the tenderness, glowing light and overlapping greens of the Hudson River School"[37] and "turn[ed] street art on its head.
[10][35] Amid her copies, Harvey cut similarly sized slots into the walls, which revealed well-lit, recently acquired, actual artworks that critic Ken Johnson wrote, hovered with "hallucinatory vividness," creating a "magical play with differing dimensions of visual experience.
[9][13][57][58] Magnetically mounted salon-style in an interlocking, movable arrangement, they reflected the museum founder's idiosyncratic curation of functional objects alongside Neo-Impressionist and early modernist paintings.
[14][6][5] Collection of Impossible Subjects featured a rear-illuminated mirror wall, hand-engraved with a salon-style collection of ornately framed, glowing sanded-out rectangles; visible through one opening was Invisible Self-Portrait in My Studio, a large trompe l’oeil painting depicting identically framed, rendered studio snippets and self-portraits based on photographs Harvey took in a mirror, with camera flashes obscuring her face.
[6][14][5] Art in America critic Gregory Volk described it as a "visually stunning" deconstruction of the creation and exhibition process that evoked things unseen, incomprehensible or unrepresented in museums.
[6] Harvey frequently draws on the Romantic tradition's idealization of ruins and fragments, reframing cycles of cultural production in order to explore fallacies and failures involving representation, communication, permanence, and ideology.
[61][1][62][12][63] For the public art commission Repeat (2013, Bossuit Belgium), she "de-restored" a desanctified, post-WWI village church that had fallen into disrepair and disuse, removing the roof, interior pillars, and ritual furnishings and transforming it into a multi-use public square-artificial ruin; a new terrazzo floor incorporated schematic traces of the removed elements and a grey pattern evoking the shadows of the previous, ruined church after its bombardment.
[61][62] They were accompanied by video projections that documented Harvey engraving the mirror images or drawing the academy's previous buildings; upon completion, they simultaneously shattered or burst into flame.
[11][67][68] Based on the classical and neo-classical ruins they find worldwide—on display in The Pillar-Builder Archive (2013), a room of 4,000 alien-classified postcards of such structures—they wildly misinterpret humanity as an egalitarian, three-sexed, aquatic species unified by the building of pillars.
[71][72][73][74] Harvey built a skeletal version of Turner's London gallery, hung with 34 rear-illuminated, hand-engraved mirrors mimicking the exhibition at the time of his death, which depicted a panoramic view of the shabbier, contemporary Margate.
"[76][78] The project's installation at Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2021) was described as an attempt to "localize existential memories," mapping a spectrum that ranged from traumatic experiences (war, racism, and ecological disaster) to more mundane losses caused by technological change or gentrification.
