31/5/2000
Ellen Harvey
De Chiara Stewart, New York
Painting is a low tech special effect. It's cheap. Anyone can do
it. No special equipment or vast resources are required. You can make
anything you want.
Low Tech Special Effects is an ongoing series of paintings that
explore
painting's almost obsolete function as a purveyor of the
imaginary and
that places painting (cheap to produce, obviously subjective) in
direct
and pathetic opposition to cinema's monolithic monopoly on the
depiction of the impossible. The paintings appear to have been
copied
from polaroids taken of the staged "special effects" referenced
in their
grandiloquent titles. The series revels in the perversity of a
painting
claiming to function as documentation of an event, especially of
a
faked event. In addition, every attempt (dimension, intentionally
non-photorealistic technique) is made to provoke the
destabilizing
inference that the source polaroids may never have existed.
Paradoxically, the special effects that the paintings pretend to
document are anything but special: a girl making a face reveals a
monster; a stone thrown into a bed is a giant meteorite; a simple
turn
of the camera creates an earthquake. The ephemeral nature of the
polaroid is the perfect complement to their utter banality.
Ultimately,
the only thing special about them is that they have been painted;
painting itself as a special effect.
Ellen Harvey lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Concurrently
Harvey will be included in an exhibition entitled "Paint on
Paint" at
Martina Detterer in Frankfurt, Germany. Her work was recently
included in the North America exhibition of the Kwangju Biennial
in
Korea, curated by Tom Finkelpearl. She has had solo exhibitions
at
Alexandre de Folin and Stefan Stux galleries in New York and has
been in group shows at Art in General, Au Base Gallery and
Pierogi
2000 in New York and in the ACC Gallery in Weimar Germany, among
others. She took part in the Whitney Independent Study program
last
year. Her work will be exhibited in exhibitions at the
Kunstpanorama in
Lucerne, Switzerland and in the Landesmuseum Joanneum
in Graz, Austria in the fall.
For more information contact: Richard Stewart 212.967.6007
De Chiara Stewart, 521 West 26th St., New York City 10001
Opening: June 1, 2000 6 - 8 p.m.
contact: 212.967.6007