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Trash collected on walks and during daily life, 2019.
From solo exhibition The Thin Place
At the Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD
Exhibition Statement:
The title of Heather Harvey’s exhibition, The Thin Place, comes from the old Celtic concept for moments of heightened permeability when veils that separate the living and dead or the human and divine are at their thinnest. It can also refer to specific places that possess a palpable ‘heaviness’ or haunted quality, particularly sacred sites or where something of great significance unfolded. Harvey expands these traditional meanings to include any transitional space, moment of uncertainty, or provisional period where everyday objects and experiences divide, collapse, intermingle, or coexist in unexpected ways. Underlying order, systems, and interconnections are revealed, amplified, transfigured, or upended. The familiar becomes strange or becomes its own foil. Moments of death and birth are perhaps the most intense, straightforward examples. Yet there are all kinds of ongoing subtle slips and thin divides once you start looking for them: the young becoming old. Material shifting into immaterial. The ordinary becoming extraordinary.
“I am interested in paying attention to whatever can challenge normal, automated ways of thinking, seeing, and understanding. So that, even within our highly mechanized, monitored, categorized, quantified way of living, we can still find areas of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and flux that open us up to possibilities, wonder and reimagining.” -Heather Harvey