Auriea Harvey, Year Zero
March 6–April 24, 2021
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 6
bitforms is pleased to announce Year Zero, Auriea Harvey’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a diverse mixed-media practice, Harvey creates sculpture, video games, drawing, and mixed reality works steeped in character creation and mythology. Year Zero introduces a new body of work nested within the legacy of Harvey’s solo and collaborative career. Working online from the beginning of net art’s history, the artist expertly combines her experience in video game and software development with a three-dimensional practice. Year Zero is a continuation of this coalescence, presenting early sketchbooks, webcam broadcasts, and multiplayer games alongside Harvey’s latest sculptural installations and drawing.
In 1999, Harvey was a member of the infamous net art collective, hell.com, where other participating artists would gather online. Webcam Movies (1999) reveal the artist in her workspace, perpetually online, at the height of net art’s emergence. It was via an early video chat in hell.com that Harvey met her long-time collaborator Michaël Samyn. The same year they founded Entropy8Zuper!, a web design and net art collaboration maintained from 1999-2006 that merged their respective web platforms—Harvey’s Entropy8 and Samyn’s Zuper. Entropy8Zuper! created several significant works integral to the legacy of digital art through their focus on born-digital environments. The interpersonal, interactive qualities ascribed to their games are exemplified through the gallery’s presentation of The Godlove Museum (2000-2007). Eventually, they founded Tale of Tales, an influential video game development studio based in Ghent, Belgium. As Tale of Tales, the duo released seminal independent videogames such as The Endless Forest (2005/2020-ongoing) and L.O.C.K. (2016). To read more about Harvey’s net artworks and video games, please read our digital timeline of the artist’s practice:Auriea Harvey, Net Archeology. Throughout her collaborations with Samyn, Harvey maintained the significance of character development as well as personal and mythological narratives within her oeuvre.
Sketchbook Videos (1990-2010) are a selected look into the artist’s collection of books containing drawings and observations, which she has kept life-long. The videos depict the artist slowly turning the pages through her own art history, revealing collage, poetry, photography, drawing, painting, 3D sculptural elements, and writing. Harvey’s practice continuously explores all mediums, as illustrated through this vast collection of works on paper. The sketchbook pages act as a precursor for the exhibited drawings and monoprints. Nyx (2016) and Sphinx (2016) present themes that embody mythical elements of darkness seen within much of Harvey’s practice. These monoprints are abstracted with a rich contrast that almost obfuscates their subjects, which appear more menacing as a result. The artist references grime and analog glitch as elements of translation that appear in her work when bringing historical archetypes into the present. Harvey’s drawings The Game (2017-2021) and Door to the Sacred(2020) intersperse biographical elements into otherwise antiquated settings—encouraging a combination of syncretism and contemporary observations on the artist’s experiences living in the ancient republic of Rome.
Folklore is a definitive aspect of this exhibition, in that it offers the artist the opportunity to interject her personal history into classical narratives. A series of maquettes and sculptures manifest Harvey’s characters into fantastic busts. The artist employs a process of 3D scanning and printing, demonstrated by the maquettes which she references as 3D sketches, before reworking larger sculptures through a process of handmade reconstruction with natural materials. Self-portraiture is an inherent feature within these sculptures, as all works include data captured by the artist of herself. Harvey’s tradition of scanning her own body goes back decades, premiering first in Entropy8Zuper!’s The Kiss: Incorporator (2007). This exploration of portraiture inserts Harvey’s identity upon scans of historic artifacts—reclaiming her uneasy relationship with antiquity. Forms are remade, recovered, and repossessed as Harvey weaves analog and digital elements together, unifying relics with emergent technology.
“Creation and destruction are divine. My sculptures are born broken. It is up to me to mend them.” – Auriea Harvey
Auriea Harvey’s work combines digital and physical processes to create sculptures in physical space and mixed reality. Drawing from her extensive experience in net art and video games in the collaborative groups Entropy8Zuper!, Tale of Tales, and Song of Songs, she brings personal narratives and character development to her sculptures. Harvey begins her sculptural process by making scans from life. These scans mutate as they are combined with others from her extensive library: 3D models based on her own clay sculptures, works of imagination digitally sculpted, and artworks encountered in museums. The works draw heavily from Hellenistic art, not only through the appropriation of forms but also using its ethos of syncretism as a way of working.
The amalgamated elements are sculpted within 3D modeling software. As Harvey molds the works, she also molds characters each with their own narratives. Each nexus of elements produces several sculptures; Harvey continues reconfiguring the pieces until the character’s story is complete. She filters well-known narratives through her own retellings. Indeed, this digital assemblage process is finished by applying a variety of physical, organic elements to the 3D prints. They are often complemented by AR sculptures, which bridge the gap between the digital and physical, the possible and impossible.
Harvey sifts through artifacts of Western culture in order to find herself and traces of her African American diasporic lineage. These objects are hybrid products, made in Western Europe but borrowing from its colonies. Her sculptures make her influences evident and she fuses them with her own creations to reinvent, reinterpret, and retell new narratives.
The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MUDAM Luxembourg, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. Her videogames and VR works have had international success, including exhibitions at the Tinguely Museum, Basel; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the New Museum, New York; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; and ZKM, Karlsruhe. Harvey is the recipient of a Creative Capital grant and a winner of the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award. She is represented by bitforms gallery, NYC.
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Year Zero Virtual Walkthrough
