I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous home, standing in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one’s head…

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Noting Thoreau’s abhorrence of ornament, Ellen Harvey’s has subverted the inside/out openness of the sun porch by replacing of exterior window panes with hand-engraved mirrors, and the panes to other interior rooms with reflective mylar. She started in the early spring by photographing the view from the porch to use as the basis for the incised drawings of a garden in decay. The landscape suggests traces of ruined architecture with barren trees and wisteria which increases in detail and specificity from the left to right side of the room. The viewer enters a totally dark space and encounters an inverted experience of the garden. While adjusting to the darkness, the nuances of the landscape in transformation slowly become clearer, the terrace architecture slips away and the “nature” takes over. The experience of the room engages the sensory observation encouraged by Thoreau.

Ellen Harvey recent installations featuring mirrors including The Museum of Failure, Luxe Gallery, New York, NY and Mirror at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA. Other solo exhibitions include: Broken Mirror Galerie Gebr, Dresden, Germany, and Beautiful/Ugly at Magus Müller, Berlin, Germany. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including the concurrent Generation 1.5 at the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY. Her commissions include University of California, San Francisco, CA; the Francisco Station for the Chicago CTA Arts in Transit; and the Queens Plaza Subway Station for the New York City Arts for Transit. She received awards from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Artists in Residence Award from the Palm Beach Cultural Council, and Lily Auchincloss Foundation Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her gem-like landscape graffiti paintings from the New York Beautification Project are documented in a recently published book. She earned her BA from Harvard, Cambridge MA her JD from Yale Law School, New Haven CT and participated in the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study Program, New York, NY.

For more information: www.ellenharvey.info