"Aggregate Optics of Make-A-Do" Opening Image

Abstract

Erin Harmon’s work dwells in the twilight zone between painting and sculpture. Filled with longing for places that do not actually exist, contradictions flourish with invocations of both the animated and the arrested, the joyful and the staid, the high and the low. Material and processes become sites for fantasy, illusion, and the interplay between flat and not-flat. The vibrant work in "Aggregate Optics of Make-A-Do" tinkers with scale to produce environments that we can project ourselves into as landscapes, even while confronting their qualities of un-nature.

Borne from Harmon’s previous body of painted paper collages, her new work is influenced by techniques common to theatrical painters, a lineage of shapes and images become a trail of breadcrumbs from one idea to another. These materials are scoured, drawn, painted, cut, and recycled over time, one idea begetting another, endlessly self-generating. Whether it be through ceramic, painted muslin, or projection animation (a collaborative video in which Harmon’s gouache-on-paper cut-outs have been animated by artist and musician Kyle Statham), the finished works encapsulate a romance with materials and processes.