Auriea Harvey
Auriea Harvey masterfully blends the physical and the digital in her innovative New Media creations.
James Dorman | Ed Cristina Brooks | 10 May 2021
Auriea Harvey (b.1971), an artist of impressive versatility, has been experimenting with net art from the earliest days of the movement. After obtaining a BFA in sculpture from Parsons School of Design in New York, she enjoyed a successful commercial career in video game production, founding her own independent game development studio in 2003. Harvey stepped back from commercial production to dedicate herself to her art in 2015. Her new work returns to her roots in sculpture while drawing on her extensive experience in the digital space exploring 3D modelling, printing and mixed reality to present works of sculpture that blend the digital and the handmade.
Current Event
Auriea Harvey, Mystic Collection on Foundation – The Mystery v5 (chroma screen) (2021) © Courtesy of the artist.
What’s next?
Artist, Title work (yyyy) © Courtesy of the artist.
txt
Did you know?
Harvey was part of the first wave of artists to explore the collaborative artistic potential of the internet through net art. She founded her own web design and net art platform Entropy8 in 1995, which in 1999 she would merge with Zuper— the website of fellow artist and designer Michaël Samyn — to form the online audio-and-text art project Entropy8Zuper!.
Collaboration with Samyn would continue with the founding of Tale of Tales, an independent video game development studio, in 2003. Their games have been widely praised for their experimental and poetic exploration of narrative and their demonstration of the artistic merits of the medium.
Featured Projects
Year Zero (2021)
Auriea Harvey, Year Zero (2021), bitforms gallery ©Auriea Harvey Courtesy of the artist
Auriea Harvey, Year Zero (2021), bitforms gallery ©Auriea Harvey Courtesy of the artist
Year Zero marks Harvey’s first solo exhibition in her native United States and offers something of a microcosm of her artistic life up to this point, while exploring her latest avenues of creativity. A select look at her own artistic history is shown through video footage of Harvey flicking through sketchbooks to reveal drawings, collages, photography, paintings and writings dating back to 1990.
In recent works displayed in the exhibition, Harvey’s roots in traditional sculpture are married to the contemporary digital practices of 3D scanning and printing to produce hybrid sculptural creations that occupy physical space and mixed reality, blurring the distinction between Old and New Media. Thematically, the works continue an exploration of Harvey’s personal history (self-portraiture being a key element of these sculptures), intertwined with classical narratives and folklore.
Auriea Harvey, La Vita Nova (2021), Digital Sculpture ©Auriea Harvey Courtesy of the artist
La Vita Nova (2021)
Harvey has contributed digital sculpture work to Synthetic Corpo-Reality, an immersive, online Digital Art exhibition curated by Julie Walsh.
Harvey’s piece, La Vita Nova, is a work of digital sculpture that consists of four 3D scanned self-portraits. A deeply personal artwork, the self-portraits were taken the day before and the day after Harvey turned 46. A fully immersive piece, the use of soundscape and changing perspective of the individual sculptural components as distinct or merged — depending on your position within the virtual space — looks to simulate a moment in one’s life where personal narratives are rewritten.
Visit Mozilla Hubs here
Auria Harvey, Group show Pieces of Me: Stygian Hand (2021) © Courtesy of the artist.
Pieces of Me (2021)
Harvey contributes a new piece of HTML/3D/AR artwork to Pieces of Me, an online collection of 50 artworks presented by TRANSFER, in partnership with left.gallery, in response to the growing NFT marketplace.
Harvey’s piece, Stygian Hand, is a digital sculpture from her series Finding the Eye, a retelling of the Greek myth of the Stygian Witches. The myth tells the tale of three sisters who shared one eye and one tooth between them; the sculpture depicts a hand holding a single petrified eyeball.
View the digital sculpture here
Auriea Harvey, Islanders (2020), Video, 6 minutes 11 seconds. ©Auriea Harvey Courtesy of the artist
Islander (2019)
Harvey contributed her work Islanders as part of Telematic gallery’s online group exhibition The Archive to Come. The short video depicted a real-time manipulation of 3D scans taken of early 20th century facial casts of Nias islanders for the History, Conflict, and Social Justice screening in the exhibition.
Click here to watch the video
Key achievements
Harvey has a permanent exhibition with Gallery 9, an online gallery of the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. Her commercial work in independent video game production is well celebrated, and Harvey was recipient of the Nuovo Award at the 2014 Independent Games Festival. She is also the first professor of video games to be employed by the German fine arts college Kunsthochschule Kassel.
Recent shows
Solo Shows
2021, Year Zero, bitforms gallery, New York City, USA
2018, Example No. 22 (Lecture/Performance/Exhibition), Kasseler Dokfest (Documentary Festival), Kassel, Germany
Group shows / Festivals
2021 The Unbody (2021) group show presenting Ox (apotheosis) + Year Zero Artifact, PPOW Gallery, NFT, US
2021 The Bardo: Unpacking the Real , curated by Julie Walsh at Feral File
2021 Minoriea (2021) PROOF OF SOVEREIGNTY, Christie’s NFT sale
2021 Pieces of Me, TRANSFER + left.gallery online (NFT show)
2021 Synthetic Corpo-Reality , curated by Julie Walsh at MEET Digital Culture Center
2020 The Archive to Come, Telematic Media Arts, Online Exhibition/ In Gallery San Francisco, US
Museums or Fairs
2019, The Coming World: Ecology as New Politics 2030-2100, Garage Museum, Moscow, Russia
2019, Cricoterie VR (presented as part of Tadeusz Kantor: Où sont les neiges d’antan), Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland
2019, Playmode, MAAT Museum, Lisbon, Portugal
2019, The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics, Rhizome/New Museum, New York City, USA
