Catalogue Essay for ‘Harley Ives: Placeless Souvenir’ 17 February – 12 March, 2022, Chalk Horse gallery, Sydney.
Oh, my love, it’s you that I dream of
‘If you don’t immediately associate Belinda Carlisle to Harley Ives, have you even met Harley Ives?’ is a hypothesis worth testing. I knew of Harley’s fondness for the former-Go-Go’s-frontwoman-turned-successful-solo-artist before I knew of my fondness for Harley, and I was instantly fond of Harley.
Oh, my love, since that day
When I connected with Harley’s ‘Flower Still Life’ (2015), it transported me to a moment 25 years earlier.
I am 5. I walk around my first gem show, hand in hand with my mother. (Incidentally, Harley will later attend the high school whose hall plays host to this event). Beauty as I have never seen it before hits me between the eyes. I am face to face with new colour, new shape, new form. What is all of this?
My world expands. The objects morph in front of me. They wink as they refract light. I wink back in recognition. They are a bowl of yum cha jellies. I slurp them up. They are buried treasure, jewels of the earth, precious shimmering magical things. I protect them. The line between what is real in front of me and what is real in my mind blurs. Inner and outer blend. I swim in a pleasurable melt of imagination and perception. A template for transcendence is born. Wonder arrives.
I am 30. I walk around an art fair, hands clasped behind my back. I clock a still-life painting. It winks at me. Wait, what? It winks again. Harley’s moving still life glistens in front of me. Beauty as I have never seen it before. Once again. It hits me between the eyes. Before me, colours, shapes, and forms play in new and familiar ways. What is all of this?
My world expands as objects transform in front of me. I am looking at a floral arrangement, shimmering jewel box, a collection of quivering smudged objects, a floral arrangement. Visual trails. I rub my eyes. Tracers. They remain. They pulse in and out. A carefully orchestrated visual score. I am lost in a pleasurable dissolution of sensory boundaries. I swim in the melt. Wonder returns.
Somewhere in my heart
Transmutations pique my interest. They are at the centre of my experience of Harley’s work, animated as it is by the dynamic interweaving of alchemy, play, paradox, rebirth, kitsch, transcendence, and irony, with a nod to the transcendent everyday, aberration as beauty, and a gently wry, distinctly Australian brand of humour.
One of the things I love most about Harley’s work – and as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist this would be one of the things I love most about Harley’s work – is what emerges as his work loosens constrictive binaries into more expansive dialectics: a reckoning with our dynamic unconscious.
As humans, we get in our own way. Often unconsciously. We reduce complex situations to a suite of opposing pairs within which we then become stuck with the choice of siding with one or the other. Moving/static, old/new, masculine/feminine, high art/low art, trash/treasure, virtual/real, everyday/sublime, hard/soft, satirical/serious, deferential/derogatory, right/wrong . . . the list goes on.
The floral forms Harley constructs in Immaterial Ornament 4 contract and expand, over and over. Such billowing movement ripples through Harley’s work, as it collapses the either-or polarities we construct that ensnare us, and then opens them up and out into both-and dialectical tensions through which dialogue and reflection can flow. Immaterial Ornament 4 is video art, sculpture and painting, chaotic and contained, destructive and generative, contemporary and 17th century floral still life, frivolous and valuable, respectful and ironic, analogue and digital, kitsch and unassuming, calm and disruptive.
The process of transformation on offer in encountering Immaterial Ornament 4 is mirrored in its creation. Harley begins by searching online for 3D Models; “the shittier the better”, in Harley’s words. The day I visit Harley in his studio, the digital found object of choice is an especially soulless-looking koi. Harley brings it to life, colouring it in, and providing it with a skeleton. The backbone enables the object to be put through a movement simulation. Renewed with soul, the vivified koi is duplicated and arranged to make a flower. (Can you spot the petal slash fish tail?).
Once Harley has assembled a bouquet, he exports this initial digital composition onto a VHS tape, records the work from this tape to another, then to another, and then to another, before converting it back into digital form. This allows him to digitally manipulate the smears, distortions, streaks, glitches and other signs of degeneration in the video image, all of which he views as analogous to painterly marks. A core component of Harley’s visual practice and idiom is drawing to our attention the indexical markers of video materiality, all the while transposing them from the register of the unremarkable to the realm of a refined visual aesthetic. Pleasure is distilled.
I’m always dancing with you in the summer rain
Harley’s work centres on the destruction of rigid binaries. From their ashes rises a freer movement within, between, and across subject positions. We become aware of that which has ossified outside of our awareness, that which we have unconsciously disowned, pushed away, and labelled as not-me. We are taken outside of ourselves. We are woken from a state we slipped into unnoticed. The banal blends into the divine and we forget how we ever tried to distinguish between the two. At the risk of sounding kitsch while eagerly leaning into it, in Harley’s hands, perhaps Heaven truly is a Place on Earth.
Dr Andrew Geeves
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist/Clinical Psychologist
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Catalogue Essay for ‘Harley Ives: Immaterial Ornament’ 27 August – 19 September, 2020, Chalk Horse gallery, Sydney.
Immaterial Ornament
As viewers we encounter this work at a time when many of our lives are more mediated by digital technologies than ever before. Much of our communication depends on these technologies as we spend more time in our domestic spaces. We’ve become familiar with the paradoxical experience of intimacy that is the Zoom call – missing the bodily presence and touch of our friends while seeing inside the homes of our colleagues; catching glimpses of housemates, family members, pets and interior design choices that we otherwise would not be privy to. It is in this strange scenario that Harley Ives offers us Immaterial Ornament, a series of works drawing from Western traditions of still-life painting and flower arrangement.
A concept found in the former is that of the impossible bouquet. Emerging from 17th century Dutch still-life painting, an impossible bouquet depicts an arrangement of flowers that could not exist as each specimen blooms in a different season and in geographic locations vast distances apart. Such bouquets are today commonplace, made possible through the global floral industry. Lest we think the impossible bouquet was killed by global capitalism and trade (and artificial flowers), Ives continues the legacy through his depiction of flowers that do not wilt over days and weeks. They do not end up discarded in a bin in a house they were bought to adorn, nor disintegrate into the earth above a grave they offered company to.
Decay and degeneration, however, are very much present in these works. As material flowers drop petals and curl, Ives’ flowers shed data and discolour. A bought bouquet will often be rendered scentless through its transportation across the world in a series of refrigerated vessels. The flowers in these works also experience transit, moving between digital and analogue modalities, a process that imparts an oversaturated glitchy aesthetic specific to the technologies used. Movement is also introduced to these compositions, resulting in objects that melt, drip, crumble, pour and rotate, performing for the viewer’s pleasure. Indeed the turning speaks to the origin of the forms present in the work, sourced from websites trading in digital 3D models. This is a marketplace designed for a variety of industries, including commercial and advertising firms and real estate agents purchasing furniture to decorate online images of houses for sale. A bleeding, again, of the digital and domestic.
These compositions are created through a complex process that involves animation, intervention, transfer, recording, rerecording, rerecording (…), transfer and layering – steps that fold together controllable and uncontrollable elements. This meticulousness mirrors the 1950s and 60s flower arrangement books collected by Ives. Books created with middle-class housewives in mind, providing instruction on how to beautify their homes. There are different ways to perceive these books: with appreciation for their kitsch appeal; as guides and inspiration for expressing creativity; as manuals for decorating the cage that was the home for so many women. Perspectives on the value of the ornamental are held in this work alongside the layered symbolism of arranged of flowers.
An example is how these moving still-lifes call to mind the use of flowers as a memento mori – a reminder of the inevitability of death. Perhaps intuiting that contemporary viewers do not need another opportunity to reflect on the fragility of life, Ives plays with this concept by designing these pieces to run as seamless loops, ad infinitum. How does this element of time and the suggestion of forever dance on screen with forms that symbolise the briefness of material existence? What possibilities may the digital and immaterial offer and what beauty can be seen in the decay?
Alex Moulis, 2020
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Essay in the exhibition catalogue for ‘Caught Stealing’ 14 June – 10 August 2019 , National Art School Gallery, Sydney.
HARLEY IVES
The source material for Van Damme (2019) and Stock Model (2019) is taken by Ives from YouTube, the trash and treasure pit of cyberspace, a location accessible and known to the masses, and owned by one of the most powerful companies in the world. In this zone, the contradictory nature of the internet is present – the democratising and utopian potential much lauded at the advent of cyberspace is bleached by real world structures of power and domination. The imagery used by Ives bears testament to this creeping of capital and sexist machismo culture.
However, the political dimensions of the source material are not the primary focus of the work. Instead, the processes of the medium and the materiality of digital landscape painting created take precedence. Images considered lowbrow, or trash, are rendered abstract through a meticulous digital process that produces unique marks and aesthetic effects generated by glitches of the software. Unique forms of beauty result, seductive in their pixelated contours and movement. Looping ad infinitum, Ives displaces the medium of the moving image from the categories of popular culture and media. When not engaging with a screen for entertainment or information, what potential for experience, thought and beauty opens up?
Alex Moulis, 2019
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Catalogue Essay for ‘Harley Ives: Cloudbusting’ 14 November – 1 December, 2018, Chalk Horse gallery, Sydney.
Conversation between Andre Hemer and Harley Ives, November, 2018.
A: I viewed a still image of the work before I saw the video and was quite surprised by the difference between the two. The still image seemed really vivid and rendered but when I watched the work it struck me as more filmic. It was darker and grittier and felt consistent in that tone, like old film. It also seemed like some of the glitches had disappeared compared to your earlier work.
H: I think one of the biggest differences for me was that I wanted this work to be a lot slower. I wanted to focus on longer movements in the composition rather than making up a busier composition of smaller moments. So, a lot of the short bursts of colour and deformation have disappeared.
A: Yes, it has a different tenor to it, and the sound element also really added to that. Where did the sound come from?
H: The sound is a recording of planes flying overhead on a particularly cloudy day. I find that sound quite musical in its variations. It’s been slowed right down though, so all you are left with is the rumble of the engines and slight drone of the plane passing through the clouds.
A: And did the clouds originate from the same shoot.
H: No, the clouds I sculpted in my studio.
A: Well that’s even more interesting because you’ve again expanded your notion of making paintings.
H: The process of physically making the clouds for this work was important to me. There has always been a conversation about material process in my work, and I felt that sculpting the clouds rather than shooting them or digitally generating them was an extension of that conversation. I wanted to sculpt and paint the whole image from the ground up in a way.
A: The other thing that struck me, and I think it ties into this point, is that this work has a real blurriness to it that reminded me of trying to visualize a memory. I think that idea sits well with you wanting to produce these imagined images.
H: I wanted to produce a series of images that exists between the real and the imagined. I know that I have always been really enamored of paintings of the sublime in the romantic era, particularly the dramatic seascapes and skies, that’s something I wanted to invoke in these works. I think in terms of subject matter as well, clouds are perfect for this kind of imagined representation because they are formless. They are really moldable, and any form could be true. I am trying to recall our memory of a sky but at the same time dramatize it and suspend it in time.
A: In terms of the relationship to painting, one of the things that interests me is your choice of colours and how saturated they are. When I am painting I would love to achieve that sort of saturation but it’s impossible. The backlit colours in this work are really native to the medium.
H: You’re right, and those oversaturated colours are something I set out to achieve from the beginning when I was lighting the clouds in the studio. Even though I often talk about my work in relation to painting I am always really aware of the native qualities of the moving image and how they can be foregrounded to transform a perception of a subject.
A: And the title for the show seems self apparent but is there something you would like to say about it?
H: My friend Shane Haseman suggested the title to me and I thought it was perfect. Cloudbusting is a reference to Wilhelm Reich’s fanciful efforts to create and destroy clouds using a machine he called a cloudbuster. Ultimately it is a reference to my own cloud making but can also refer to contemporary anxieties about cloud seeding and the potential for more extreme weather events in the Anthropocene. I find it interesting that painting the sublime is timeless, and at the same time a historical index.
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Catalogue Essay for ‘Harley Ives: Painted Screen’ 23 June – 23 July, 2016, Chalk Horse gallery, Sydney.
Harley Ives was born in Penrith in 1981. To all appearances a boring suburb and an insignificant year, and yet he was born under a constellation of technological events that would determine his future interests. By his early teens, the inexorable slowness of dial-up Internet was a domestic reality, just as the humble Video Home System (VHS), a ubiquitous household item since the 1970s, was being phased out for the Digital Video Disk (DVD). By his twenties, digital television had replaced its analogue predecessor and digital cameras were far more common than their film counterparts. By his thirties, Ives had experienced fifteen years of analogue technology and fifteen years of digital technology. As a cusp X/Y generation artist he was nostalgic for the materiality of his youth, and seduced by the potential of a coded future. It is no great surprise then, that Ives considers himself an intermediary. His landscapes are captured on site digitally, recorded and played in a degenerative process through VHS, before being digitally manipulated in post-production. The complexity of these processes, adapted to achieve one desired outcome, approximate the challenge of mediating and translating content in an information saturated era. Distilling knowledge from the slough of digital information carried in blogs, podcasts, videos, periodicals, books, and archives, requires technological literacy, a critical eye, and finely tuned research skills. Ives’ mediation of the moving image, however, reaches beyond information content to its fundamental nature. It was the rise of analogue television in the 1960s that compelled Marshall McLuhan to first declare that the ‘medium is the message’, that is, that a mediums impact on society is not solely based on the content delivered, but the characteristics of the medium itself. In this sense the subject matter of Painted Screen is secondary to its medium. Ives’ moving image mediations respond to the increasing obsolescence of analogue technology in everyday life, and the nostalgia for material sources of aesthetic pleasure. Julia Clements, for example, is a “still” life composed of found imagery lovingly cut from the old bouquets of a dog-eared flower arranging book, digitally collaged to create, amusingly, a flower arrangement. The nostalgia for the lost art of domestic needlework and flower arranging is expressed through his meditative but laborious digital craftsmanship.
Anxieties about losing the material authenticity (what Roland Barthes called the indexical quality) of celluloid film mark the twenty-first century version of a shift away from object ‘aura’. Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) first described the loss of aura – an affect of the originality, craftsmanship, and historical specificity of the art object – as the direct impact of reproducible arts such as analogue photography and film. Almost a century later digital code threatens the aura of celluloid, and simultaneously realises the world as a floating visual simulacrum. Benjamin believed, however, that what the medium lacked in aura it made up for with the political potential of its accessibility and popular appeal. These are the critical narratives competing in Ives’ moving images. By taking into account the mediums mode of transmission (played to an exhibition audience in an institutional context), he takes the moving image from Benjamin’s ideal pop-cultural locus and redirects it into an art historical discourse. Like the early pictorialist photographers, Ives manipulates the medium in post-production for painterly effects, but like the straight photographers that followed, he also highlights qualities unique to the medium: not photographic precision, sharpness, and clarity, but medium-specific errors, or process artefacts. In other words, Ives exploits the glitch characteristics of both analogue and digital processes for aesthetic effect. The analogue artefacts present in both Cloud Composition and Julia Clements include colour bleeding, image skewing, and oversaturation, while the surreal post-freeze shadows are artefacts of a digital cliff. Ives meticulously layers these effects on screen as though they were oils from a palette. The subsequent images evoke the sublime atmospheric effects of a Turner, or the perceptual honesty (and implied physical limits) of a Monet. Here the content is an important partner to the medium; by mediating traditional painting genres such as landscape and still life, Ives explicitly responds to a modernist trajectory of abstraction that declined in the mid-twentieth century. Its recuperation, he seems to suggest, might be found in the struggle to grasp visual ‘truth’ in a world mediated by screens.
Jaime Tsai, 2016
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Catalogue Essay for ‘Harley Ives: Lake Liddell’ 27 November – 2O December 2O14, Chalk Horse gallery, Sydney.
Harley Ives is an inventive and thoughtful video artist. If the contemporary is at least in one sense defined by a new approach to history, Ives embodies this ambivalence. The past, present and future all conflate into the now, where linear art history dissolves all together into an overall equivalence. The most immediate response to Ives work is that he is in some way “returning” video, or at least the picture on the screen, to painting. This is definitely true and he mines the genres of painting to make this connection explicit: the sublime waterfall, flowers in a vase in portrait format, various landscapes in landscape format.
But since Andy Warhol’s “still” videos like Empire 1964 in which he photographed the Empire State Building for twenty-four hours compressed into about an eight hour loop this sort of static video has questioned video’s approach to time and movement. If the time and movement is merely a subtle aspect of the video presented it is still present as a defining characteristic of the medium. This approach tempers the painterly quality in Ives’ work.
In Lake Liddell Ives hones in particularly on landscape and the beautiful aspect of the sun slowly rising on the scene. In a fluke of politically pertinent timing Lake Liddell images a coal burning power station. The work is not directly about the pros and cons of coal power but of course these concerns cannot altogether be quarantined. This aspect marks the contemporary and the documentary aspects of the work. Ives successfully counters this reality with the fantastical and the painterly.
When Ives chose the lake it was for its connection to the Romantic sublime. The sunrise on a lake is a classic trope of the Romantic (like the waterfall). A cloud (often representing the awesome power of God or nature) was a constant and vital motif in many of the paintings of the Romantic period in various tempests, deluges and Exoduses. Often the clouds took on their own persona pointing to and directing the scene. Here the clouds rise in a double form, an enclosed circuit of two, that is less like a Supreme Being, or God and more like the superego of bureaucratic processes (think of the World Trade Centre twinning as the quintessential closed circuit of capital as suggested by Baudrillard).
But the shift from the Romantic cloud into the steam of industry was already an extension explored by the Impressionists: train steam, power plants (in the back of Seurat’s paintings of Asnires for example) and assorted factories. Even here the painters oscillated between celebration of the new spectacles and the anxieties of the machine age. At the turn of the century when Monet visited London to paint Parliament House at sunset recent scholarship has shown that Parisians often travelled to London to see the beauty and soft edges of this new thing called smog; London at that time was one of the few places on earth with this new modern sublime.
Ives attacks the indexical reality of the video form by placing the images under different types of distress. Often this is an analogue distress when he brings the digital image back into analogue video tape to scrunch and munch it. The glitches here are not just digital but analogue. The music too shows its age and comes from an old 5Os recording. The temporal aspects and ideas of history seem again to come to the fore. The work embodies the history of painting and video, it has the long time of painting and comes right up into the present. In this work particularly there is a grand theme of the sublime that Ives has successfully played with and shifts between the kitsch, the romantic and the darkly critiqued. That the beautiful returns to bring everything together is the last fillip of contemporary perversity.
Oliver Watts, 2014