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