The photos are lined up neatly, like a checkerboard, fixed to the wall with binder clips. They feature a blurred figure caught in motion, her arms tracing the lines of sculptures in front of her. This is just one piece by artist Kim Harty, BOLT Resident artist, as she breaks down artmaking frame by frame in her new exhibition "Human Factors." Using motion capture technology, chronophotography, and projection, Harty's pieces seek to record the elusive artistic process and examine the dichotomy between human expression and industrial efficiency. The solo exhibition is on view at the Chicago Artists Coalition throughl Tuesday, June 14. (Disclosure: Kim is the former managing editor of GLASS Quarterly.)
While her body of work over the years has been vast and varied, how the artist's body interacts with their materials, as well as the physical world as a whole, is a theme Harty has always explored. It is rememincient of some of the work grouped under the banner of Abstract Expressionism, a movement from which Jackson Pollock earned his fame. Pollock's distinctive splattered canvases were seen by Harold Rosenberg, among other critics, as records of the movements used to create them, that aspect being defined as Action Painting, which overlaps with and is sometimes used interchangably with, Abstract Expressionism. It is this idea of movement that Harty's work explores and seeks to document. For example, her 2012 piece "Attempt to Recreate a Wave" is a kinetic sculpture covered with chiffon fabric and designed to mimic the motion of a tidal wave. The sculpture is accompanied by a video showing the artist's futile attempts to reconstruct this natural phenomena until the machine breaks down. Another of Harty's works in a 2013 exhibit entitled "The One Best Way To Do Work." This performative piece questions the role of the artist within the glass studio and how their process is shaped by space constraints.
"My work examines the alchemical relationship between the artist and raw materials, and exploits the process of transformation inherent in artmaking," Harty states on her website. "I create sculpture, installation and performance through the appropriation and reinterpretation of found objects and their histories. My work cultivates meaning by forgings relationships between the artists’s body, materials and technologies that leave the viewer with a palpable sensation, one which is both visual and phenomenological."
It is the performative and technical aspects of art that Harty emphasizes in "Human Factors," asking her audience, "How does this efficiency imperative function within the artist’s studio, and what are the human factors governing the artist’s production of objects?"
It it a question that Helen Lee, tries to answer in her provocative essay about the exhibition.
Harty has an MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to her work as an artist, she is a writer and educator, having taught at the School of the Art Institute, Ox-bow Art School, and Penland School of Crafts. Her works have been shown around the world, exhibited in the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Corning Museum of Glass. Currently, she holds the BOLT Residency, a prestigious one-year residency program that has given her this 500-square-foot gallery space and the opportunity to display her newest project.
IF YOU GO:
"Human Factors" Kim Harty Chicago Artists Coalition 217 N Carpenter St. Chicago, Illinois 60607 Tel: 312.491.8888 Website