Ellen Harvey, Looking Glass iPad, Kindle & Nook

Ellen Harvey
Looking Glass iPad, Kindle & Nook
2014
Three laser-etched Plexiglas mirrors mounted on Lumisheets with Plexiglas frames and Plexiglas shelf
13 x 30 x 1-1/2 inches (33.02 x 76.2 x 3.81 cm)

Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist from APT

About the Artwork

Conceived in 2014, Looking Glass, iPad, Kindle & Nook consists of the juxtaposition of three rear-illuminated mirrors matching the corresponding sizes of the three electronic devices. Each of the screens displays an excerpt of the first chapter of a different edition of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in which Alice ponders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror. Reflective qualities have long been one of Harvey’s fascinations: “I like this idea of a mirror that lies. Many of my projects that use mirrors have also used the mirror as an alternative reality that informs and in turn is informed by its surroundings.”

Although Harvey mainly considers herself a painter, the use of reflective surfaces has gradually gained importance in her practice as a means of expanding the possibilities of the bi-dimensional work: “It’s another flat view of the world, limited yet seductively infinite. Like a painting, it’s an object hung on a wall—an utterly conventional piece of interior decoration—but it exerts a kind of fascination that most paintings would give their metaphorical eyeteeth to have. You can walk past a painting without looking; it’s almost impossible to do that with a mirror. I want to steal that for my own work— I want to seduce people into stopping and thinking.”

About the Artist

Ellen Harvey (b. 1967) is a British-born artist working in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School and took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program and the PS1 National Studio Program.

Harvey is in the collections of many prestigious institutions around the world including Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland, Gwangju Art Museum, Gwangju, Korea, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NY, The Progressive Collection, Cleveland, OH, and Queens Museum, Long Island City, NY. Harvey has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and internationally and was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.  Solo exhibitions include Metal Painting, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2015); The Unloved, Groeninge Museum, Bruges, Belgium (2014); The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington DC at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2013); The Nudist Museum, Bass Museum, Miami Beach, FL (2010); Ruins are More Beautiful, Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland (2009); Mirror, Pennsylvania Academy of Art (2005); and A Whitney for the Whitney, Philip Morris at the Whitney Museum at Altria (2003). She has completed permanent installations for New York Percent For Art, New York Arts in Transit, the Flemish National Architect and the Federal Art in Architecture program, among others and she is currently working on Waterways, a new commission for the Miami Beach Convention Center. She is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2016.