Art I Saw: Tuesday Edition
I wanted to like this exhibition.
Auriea Harvey
The Unanswered Question
bitforms gallery
31 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
April 4–May 25, 2024
Beauty is the business i am in, it is not always comfortable. Operating between the shadow and the light. I really hope you like what you see. — Auriea Harvey, Entropy8
Auriea Harvey has been making digital work since the beginning of the WWW, pursuing both creative and commercial forays into game design. Her site Entropy8 is a joy to visit—it looks like the future-past vision of cyberspace in 1990s, with patterns and typography that blend together the digital-analog layering found in both Sandman comics and Ray Gun magazine. At bitforms, Harvey presented a series of “smallish” sculptures—I say “smallish” because none are larger than a beagle (woof!)—that feature mythic layerings of human faces and animal bodies and melting skulls and weaponry. Along with Sandman, Ray Gun, and all sorts of ancient myths, there’s a bit of Greco-Roman vaporwave aesthetic to be found here.
So, without resorting too much to description as a way to defer critique, I didn’t understand what was going on with the condition of the murals. Walking into the gallery, the printed collages Fate (2023) and Constellation (2023) shimmered in pristine condition. But the murals looked like they’d been wrinkled during the shipping process, with torn corners and taped-up edges.
Is the seeming indifference to the presentation because the murals in the gallery aren’t for sale in printed form? If so, this is a reversal for exhibitions of digital and digital-adjacent art exhibitions. Compared to several years ago, when it was deemed more difficult to sell a digital version of a work, there would often need to be a flashy, saleable component in the gallery or at the fair; now, it’s the online version that matters. But this shouldn’t be the only version that matters—or else, why bother with a storefront exhibition space?
Please, let me know if I’m overreacting. Like I said, I wanted to like the exhibition. I also don’t want to offend anyone at bitforms. (Yes, I still have a little bit of PTSD from all the trolls years ago, etc.) But as someone who’s curated exhibitions both online and off, I wouldn’t feel comfortable with this type of display.
Sorry in case of any typos~