“SITE1 (2023)” by Auriea Harvey
Title:
- SITE1 (2023)
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
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Artist Statement:
Exhibition Symbiosis, artport x ISEA. Forum des Images, May 16 – 21
Red blades spiral out in a circle over a black sky, with a yellow glow and more geometric shapes behind. In the center interlocking gold rings rotate over intricate and increasingly smaller details.
In SITE1, a fly-through of a three-dimensional space takes viewers on a journey into an intricate, machinic object resembling a spinning wheel, which gradually evolves into a cave-like environment.
The object is an abstracted star chart and computerized cosmology based on L.O.C.K., a previous work Harvey created as part of the artist duo Tale of Tales. The planetary constellations evoked by the spinning wheel—Mars, Mercury, and Earth itself—function as a chart that draws viewers into a cave. Embedded in it are elements of the characters depicted in Auriea Harvey’s sculpture Ox, which exists in physical form and as a virtual model. Among these characters are Fauna, based on a scan of Harvey’s head, and Minoriea, a futuristic goddess that is half woman, half bull and has been the artist’s avatar in virtual worlds since 2017. The virtual world of SITE1 represents an archaeological dig into the “origin site” of Harvey’s characters—an excavation of the universe that the artist is building from mythologies and personal stories. Just as Ox blends boundaries between virtual and tangible forms, SITE1 merges a virtual object and an environment. Viewers can navigate the work by scrolling, or hit the “enter” / “return” key for a continuous scroll.
