With a deft hand for the miniature and a fair dose of wonder for life observed, Claire Harvey transforms everyday materials and witnessed subjects into fascinating microcosms.
*Photo above: Installation view, Claire Harvey, Into the Ordinary, 2014, SECCA commission.
June 14 - Sept 15, 2014
Art based in observation underlines the importance of the act of seeing. With a deft hand for the miniature and a fair dose of wonder for life observed, Claire Harvey transforms everyday materials and witnessed subjects into fascinating microcosms. As if looking simultaneously in aerial and close-up views, she constructs roving constellations of people into which we can project ourselves or become part of the image.
In her twin investigation of portraiture and medium, Harvey re-purposes glass slides and ordinary office supply—sticky-tack, scotch tape, post-it notes—into the substrate that holds these small worlds of her invention. Capturing moments while in transit in Harvey's adopted city of Amsterdam and her native London, her portable and small-scale portraits become a travelogue of her own city, a search for connection with the anonymous figure in the crowd.
For her first solo museum show in the US at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Harvey has assembled an immersive installation completely on site entitled Into the Ordinary. As if to embrace the ephemeral nature of human experience through her work, we are invited to enter knowing it will never again reappear in this particular configuration.
2014 Solo Series–Summer: Claire Harvey / Neil Goldberg?
Artists Claire Harvey and Neil Goldberg hold our attention rapt on the small, ephemeral and seemingly ordinary aspects of daily reality, making observation fascinating.
Artist Biography
Claire Harvey (1976) was born in the United Kingdom and currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has had solo shows at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Espacio MeBAS, Santander and Cantabria, Spain; Lombard-Fried Projects, New York City, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and the Tate Modern, London, England. Group exhibitions in the United States include Small at the Drawing Center (June, 2014) and Making the Room–The Space Between 2 and 3 Dimensions at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. In 2007 she received the prestigious Prix de Rome and has been artist-in-residence at Iaspis, Stockholm, Sweden; Very Real Time, Cape Town, South Africa; and the Rijkakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Daily Measures is her first solo museum show in the United States.
Curated by Cora Fisher, SECCA Curator of Contemporary Art.
Exhibition support for Claire Harvey: Daily Measures is granted by the Mondriaan Fonds.
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