The Future Enters Into Us This Way
From the exhibition Fractious Happy, at the Delaware Center for the Creative Arts, 2009.
Plaster, fiberlglass, and paint on wall, 2009.
Using gallery walls as the very medium she manipulates—by building up and layering with plaster or scraping, sanding, and puncturing, her sculpture embeds itself in the skin of the perimeters of the space.
Two walls facing each other seem to have been kneaded and coaxed into seamless ripples, rainwater splashes, or undulating, concentric circles—as if the transformed flatness of the wall had been preserved as it was in the process of liquefying. Swells and dips in plaster applied directly on the gypsum boards render the hard surface of the institutional wall pliant and billowing under our gaze or nearly heaving and stabbing the air with shaped plaster as if the wall were slinging toward the viewer portions of its yielding self. Harvey’s walls intone presence and movement as they frame a space devoid of objects.
-Excerpted from the exhibition essay by Carina Evangelista, Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art, DCCA, Full curatorial statement here.