Empire
Found materials collected in NYC, wire, paint, paper, paper pulp, mixed media.
2023
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Empire, works with experiences and observations gathered while living in New York City during a NARS Foundation International residency. The work captures the full vitality, energy, and joy of being immersed in the city as well as the horrors of its post-capitalist legacies, the urban grit, and the everyday aggressions amidst a record-breaking heat wave. The result is a delicate intertwining of the abject and the sublime and an orbiting tension between the beautiful and the grotesque.
Empire, is part of a larger body of work in development during Harvey’s time at NARS that explores how specific locations and experiences can mark a person and create a whole complex of memories, bodily impressions, and subjective references that are formative but also ephemeral and difficult to describe or make sense of. These private recollections have parallels to larger communal, universal, and shared knowledge bases. The working idea is that there are microcosmic and macrocosmic analogies, or structural similarities, between one human’s experience and the cosmos as a whole, and that you can infer aspects of a universal/objective reality by working with aspects of personal/subjective experience, and vice versa.