Judi Harvest
FRAGMENTED PEACE

The creative work of Judi Harvest has always been involved with history and memory, both personal and collective. In the past she has realized multi-media works that in the same moment declared intense, idea-filled motivations, and extraordinary formal qualities. I am thinking in particular of "Rhinoscimento," an installation presented for the occasion of the 2001 Biennale di Venezia, where the American artist took as a "pre-text" a historic painting by Longhi which represented the arrival of a rhinoceros in the city — and moreover, she placed this in relation to the irreparable loss of Teatro La Fenice. This resulted in a work dense with multiple and intriguing symbolic values which Judi Harvest realized using symbolic materials (lava dust, glass, dried flowers, etc.) which appears in the end with clamorous autonomy as a "work made of art."

Moreover, this is as always her characteristic manner of working, such as twenty years ago, for example, when she filled a room with dried flowers or used live goldfish in a series of glass bowls. The work presented for this occasion confirms her nomadic ideas and uninhibited employment of materials, part of her dramatic reflection on the state of the world, and not by chance is this work titled "Fragmented Peace."

She also lives 100 meters from Ground Zero, and affirms in her catalog text the painful belief that "the world changed forever after September 11th." This time she has realized a multiple work which appears central to her recent research. It is a series of small Buddhas which she has titled "YOUAREWHATYOUTHINK," placing these words like a warning sign inside the case. Together with the small Buddhas is a large Buddha figure made from very colorful pieces of discarded Murano glass, historically one of her preferred expressive materials. The large sculpture consists of a metal net-like structure completely filled with rough fragments of glass in bright, seductive, pure colors. Having traveled on such a road before, she arrives at a work that is also strongly symbolic, empty inside to contain "new ideas and new thoughts" — she says herself — with the glass bound together with the interlacing of welding and the connections like relations which can weave between people. Fragmented, in the end, like the idea of peace which unfortunately we have today and recognizable for the many ethnic groups and different cultures the colors symbolically represent.

Once again Judi Harvest has realized a "great work" which expressly declares the motives for her existence, her necessity and the reasons for her irrepressible spirit. And once again with her work, she places art in relation with great historic events — which, by the way, she has always done in the past — putting her significantly in the position of absolute centrality in the life and destiny of mankind in our time.

 

Enzo Di Martino