Judi Harvest

July 12, 2006  18:30

BR: Why did you become obsessed with the moon? How did this moon theme start?

JH: As a child I grew up in Miami and watched the space shots in school, I took a trip with my family to Cape Canaveral …Telstar was launched in 1962 which was the first communication satellite and the beginning of direct TV, cell phones and first time you could call long distance directly without an operator so it was a communications revolution.

BR: What does the moon mean to you?

JH: I think of the moon as a loyal friend. Every night it appears around the same time, it has a face, it is reliable, romantic, a symbol of wholeness and fullness, but nothing really lives there. Nothing can live there. You can go there, but you can’t live there. The reflection of the full moon water, the way it lights up the sky, how you can see it even while the sun is still out. As a child I created an imaginary playmate called Moonik who I thought was coming here since we were going there.

The recent moon project, Luna Piena and the works associated with it evolved from my giant glass sculpture of a Buddha titled Fragmented Peace. Buddha was filled with fragments but the structure is whole. The idea of Fragmented Peace is we should not be satisfied with fragments but seek peace in its entirety. It seems to be an idealistic perhaps impossible idea, first our world is in fragments and second because we have no peace, only more and more fragmented wars.

BR: You must have had some idealistic dream in mind.

JH: Of course I realize the world is in pieces. But there is the concept of inner peace which one can have even in the worst times. There are symbols that come to mind, after Buddha and the concept of fragility in Murano glass, I started thinking about universe. The whole world has an expiration date given the way we treat the environment. I asked myself why we were exploring space, sending a rover to Mars. We want to see what happened there. They used to have water, now there is none. We are not the only country exploring outer space. We had the first manned landing on the moon but Russia actually sent the first space craft there. But both landed on the Sea of Tranquility.

BR: Do you think we have come to a point that we must escape our own planet? Is this work a metaphor for leaving earth?

JH: No. It is a warning to be more careful about our environment or we will end up like Mars. Emotionally I leave daily, of course. The imagination permits you to travel mentally anywhere.

BR: Why does your recent work seem to be engaged with cosmic imagery?

JH: On earth we are surrounded by chaos whereas the cosmos is strictly ordered, the stars come out in the same pattern every night, there are 365 days to the year, the moon goes through the same phases every month.

BR: Have you been influenced by any other artist’s cosmic imagery?

JH: I think the Italian movement Spazialismo launched by Lucio Fontana influenced me—I have spent a lot of time in Italy. Art for me is about space and communication.

BR: You see in this latest work Venetian Satellite a new concern with communication. Why are you so involved with this concept?

JH: Art for me has always been about communication. We may not need more art, but we need more communication in general. That is the message I wanted to send. By coincidence I think my Venetian Satellite is the same size and weight as the original Telstar satellite developed by Bell Labs, launched July 10, 1962.

BR: What about the men in the moon made of blown Murano glass you call “Mooniks”? Is this your bow to Stephen Spielberg and his idea of extraterrestrials visiting earth in the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

JH: No, actually these Mooniks have come to Venice to see the canals that move because the canals on Mars have dried up. They are here to warn us of what can happen to us if we are not careful. They have four fingers because they don’t work with their hands anymore. I have worked in Murano since 1987 precisely because all the work is done by hand. It is one of the last places on earth where art is still entirely hand made. This is important to me.

BR: Tell me about the technical processes you have used in executing these pieces.

JH: Like my other recent works, they combine the ancient techniques of glass blowing with contemporary media such as computerized drawings which are necessary to execute the large pieces. The steel frame structure is welded in Murano. Indeed everything is made in Murano. The windows of the satellite are made of canes of glass typically used in Murano. Sometimes they have a candy cane effect. The lights inside are LED which light up in rainbow colors on a computer circuit.

BR: You were trained as a painter, but you have become more and more involved with video and installations recently. Why do you feel painting is not enough? Why have you been involved with technology directly recently?

JH: I continue to paint. I love to paint. But I don’t believe in limitations. I’m concerned with beauty in my work and I find the mechanism of the universe beautiful and at the same time fragile like Murano glass.

BR: Why is so much of your work been involved with Venice and its history?

JH: Venice is one of the seven most endangered places on earth. The environment has always been an issue in my work, sometimes it is species extinction, sometimes it is the collapse of ecological systems.  I feel very fortunate to be in Venice. Caffé Florian has always been one of my favorite places in the world. I feel honored to have a piece there because it represents everything that is disappearing, civilization, elegance, beauty, tradition, history.  It’s a place without a clock. When you are there, time does not matter. You do not have that sense of speed and rush that is the rule today. It is a dream for me to have a piece in the Caffé Florian. After 9/11, I had to come back to Venice immediately to take down the show I was having called Rhinoscimento. I called all my friends who came to visit and we sat in the Caffé Florian for hours, listening to the orchestra, toasting life and a beautiful world that was now like an endangered species.

BR: You have a current show of paintings at the Venice Design Gallery. Are they related to the satellite and lunar images?

JH: Yes they are directly related. I often solve the technical problems of the sculptures through the paintings.

BR: What do you mean?

JH: I visualize the finished object in the paintings and then I realize them in glass in Murano. The Buddha and the Moon were both paintings before they became sculptures. The Satellite was at first a collage and then a painting and finally a large sculpture suspended in space.

BR: Were there technical difficulties?

JH: Of course, enormous ones. For example in the Venetian Satellite, like NASA was a weight issue because it hangs in space. Anything that goes into space has a weight issue. I had a conscious weight limitation because I did not want to damage the 18th century ceiling in any way. Yet I had to give a sense of massiveness. Everything had to be weighed, the glass, the steel, scrolling message sign, the LED lights—even the paint. It is as carefully calibrated as a rocket. Nothing can go wrong so a great deal of effort and precision goes into making sure that nothing does.

BR: Do you think there is any relationship between art and science?

JH: Definitely. Just the chemistry of mixing colors, the way glass is made in Murano using the elements of fire and earth and the sense of the unknown. In art we don’t know how something will turn out. Science deals with discovery and the unknown. So does art.

BR: Do you consider Venetian Satellite public art?

JH: Yes. I think everyone can relate to this piece.

BR: How did the concept of the communication satellite evolve?

JH: Like all my work, it was a direct continuation of the piece before it, Luna Piena which is in Venice moored in front of the San Marco vaparetto stop. I would go to Caffé Florian to communicate about my work and was fascinated by its history. It was opened in 1720 and has operated as a place where people meet and talk ever since. The very idea of a café is of course about a meeting for conversation.