Judi Harvest

by Barbara Rose

At first it might seem that Judi Harvest’s current project, Venetian Satellite, has little to do her last major project, Luna Piena, which focused on the theme of the moon and its phases.  In fact there are many connections. Venetian Satellite like LunaPiena, is produced in Murano with the master craftsmen who have identified the city of Venice through the ancient tradition of creating beautiful objects in glass. By coincidence, Venetian Satellite is connected to Luna Piena because it is geographically close to Harvest’s blown glass homage to the power of the moon, which became a popular attraction docked at the San Marco vaporetto station. From there it is only steps to the Piazza San Marco, where Venetian Satellite has been invited by the Caffé Florian, the historic café and meeting place in the center of the Piazza, the heart of Venice.

Harvest’s love affair with Venice began years ago when as a young artist she lived and painted there. Much of her work since that time has dealt with themes alluding to the history and culture of the great Adriatic city. Rhinoscimento, for example, was an ambitious installation including her first video which commemorated the fire that destroyed the Venetian opera house La Fenice and the fragility of Venice as a city of canals requiring constant care as well as providing a sense of magical enchantment.

Venetian Satellite continues this series of large scale installations, but this time it is not only the city of Venice but also an imaginary voyage into outer space that captures the artist’s attention. The ideas of space travel and communication, the dominant theme of our time, are tied together in Venetian Satellite whose forms are based on the first craft sent into space from earth to reach the moon. For Harvest, communication is the key to man’s survival. Considering the current refusal of hostile governments to communicate with each other, this theme of survival through communication seems particularly apposite. The setting in the Caffé Florian is also specific, a memory of a time when spoken communication was direct before the disembodied chatter of emails and other technological wonders displaced human contact with electronic messaging.

Harvest’s works are intended to be beautiful not depressing, nevertheless her choice of subjects indicates an awareness of the precariousness of the human condition at the beginning of the twenty first century. She is aware of the import of remarks made by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in a lecture titled "Origin of the Universe".  According to Hawking, we cannot be sure of the future of the universe which may instead of expanding, suddenly collapse. Hawking has suggested that in order to survive man must leave planet earth for outer space. Harvest’s response to such a situation is to turn the first space craft into a work of art.

Because she was born and brought up in Florida, the site of Cape Canaveral, where the first space satellite was launched, Harvest has memories of this event that are particularly acute.

Harvest used advanced computer modeling to plan her works beginning with the huge Buddha made of welded stainless steel and blown Murano glass, Fragmented Peace, which was also seen in Venice, remaining moored at the same San Marco vaporetto stop that Luna Piena later occupied.  FragmentedPeace was the first important work she made after witnessing first hand, the horror of 9/11 because she lived near Ground Zero. The subsequent works made of glass are cathartic and express the hope that man will be able to survive in the cosmos through communication.

Judi Harvest belongs to that category of artist who is impelled to break the boundaries of separating the arts by working in a variety of media from drawing to painting to glass sculpture, assemblage, collage and most recently video. All of her works, however, have this in common: they are inspired directly by her own experiences. Like Picasso, she transforms her autobiography into the rich iconography of her art.

No matter how difficult the moment, both personal and historical, she wants her art to celebrate joyous festivals and participatory spectacles like opera and theater.   Her curiosity draws her both to the microcosmic world of insects and sea creatures as well as most recently to the sensational discoveries of astrophysics. Her restless imagination aspires always to transcend the mundane and to transform what she sees and feels into visions she shares with the spectator that lift us from the limitations of the present moment permitting us to imagine voyages through outer space that free us from the boundaries of quotidian experience, permitting us to dream of other worlds and of a future without limits to liberty.

Born in the exotic vacation land of Miami, Florida, Judi Harvest has never forgotten the colors of the flamingos, both real and artificial, nor of the tropical foliage of her native city. Her experiences as an art student, both in Italy, where she studied with such masters of Jannis Kounellis and in the U.S. where her teachers were among the greatest painters of the New York School formed her vision. As a mature artist she remains faithful to the traditions of painterly painting, assemblage and of representation that she absorbed as a young artist which continue to inform her art. Her development as a narrative artist corresponds to the most recent developments in contemporary art influenced by the drama and movement of film as much as by the poetry of color and light.

Judi Harvest’s life in Italy her second country, have marked her art since her years as a student. She has never forgotten the lessons of the old masters and their vigorous brushwork and attention to drawing and detail. Her summers in Panarea have been as much an inspiration as her experience living and working in Venice which inspired the series of works based on Venetian themes and legends, the paintings of Pietro Longhi and her witnessing of the tragedy of the fire that destroyed the Teatro de la Fenice, which she filmed and photographed, integrating these images into her work.

Returning from Venice to New York, Harvest was confronted with enormous tragedy of 9/11 and the destruction of the Twin Towers, visible from her own home. Wandering the streets of Ground Zero, she gathered the fragments that spoke of the human carnage that had transpired. Working with her long time companions, the glass blowers of Murano, she produced a series of glass sculptures commemorating these human souvenirs. Later their images were inserted into her poetic videos, which recounted in poetic recreations what she had seen and experienced, both in Venice and New York.

Searching for an alternative to violence and bloodshed, Harvest began concentrating on the images of peace and tranquility represented by the Buddhas of Asia.  This transition from meditating on loss and tragedy to her search for means to achieve a transcendent state of contemplation and universal acceptance that transcends the history of the West with its bloody wars resulted in her focus on the more ancient traditions of Asia.  The Buddha images which she realized as glass sculptures, including the monumental Buddha exhibited in Venice during the Biennale of 2003 were born of her own necessity to achieve inner peace. However, they speak to all who seek a moment of rest and reflection. Judi Harvest often speaks of the power of art to heal. Her belief in this healing power drives her art and her imagination. Her fascination with the phoenix that burns and rises again, resurrected from its own ashes has stayed with her ever since she began to document the history of the Teatro La Fenice.

Searching for an inspirational theme that once again suggested transcendence and flight, she became transfixed by the images arriving from the various satellite cameras launched to investigate outer space. The possibility that we wait for a communication from elsewhere that will permit us not only to fly above the world but to visit distant planets excites her. As a child, she dreamed of an imaginary playmate, a Martian who visited her nursery and spoke to her of exploring other worlds, far from Miami, worlds that sparkled with space dust and meteors more brilliant than all the reflections of the lights on the canals of Venice.

Judi Harvest teaches us that we may travel not only by boat and train and plane but also by projecting our imagination. Such imaginative projections have influenced such directors as Stanley Kubrick and Stephen Spielberg, whose films undoubtedly formed a part of Harvest’s experiences. The necessity to project ourselves to a higher plane than that represented either by mundane conformist reality or by the horror of the historic calamities which are frozen in the images that bombard us daily is interpreted by the artist as a launch pad for a new group of works. These lunar images celebrate the beauty of the vast and interminable universe. They transport us to a glittering world of stars, planets and solar systems so distant they appear to us only as distant specks. Her whirling galaxies and sequined meteor trails are the contemporary equivalent of the excitement felt by the Futurists in their discovery of mechanical movement on the earth and the possibility of the transformation of the world through the miracles of industrial and scientific progress. Her sequined streams tracing the paths of falling stars and comets recall the sequined ballrooms of Severini, and serve for her as they did for the great Italian modernist both to establish the location of the picture plane as well as to animate the surface with real materials produced to embellish and decorate.

No artist creates in a vacuum. The artist cannot avoid his or her historical context and its impact on the human condition. How the artist interprets the role of art at any given time determines its content. One may like Goya or Warhol, mirror reality, the better to force confrontation. Other artists, however, see their duty as offering an alternative to the suffering imposed by nature and by human nature. Judi Harvest belongs to the latter group. She celebrates rather than mourns, feasts rather than fasts. To continue to celebrate life and light, voyages of exploration and discoveries through experimentation, as well, as in her most recent works, to accept the risk of chance and accident and to incorporate them, like Jackson Pollock and the action painters into a structure ultimately controlled by aesthetic decisions has given her work a new technical freedom that corresponds to her quest for personal freedom and transcendence. Like the Beatles’ famous heroine Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (actually an acronym for the ecstatic visions evoked by L.S.D.) Judi Harvest makes works that shine like the heavenly bodies, without the benefit of any chemicals except those produced by the brain when stimulated to produce its own magic chemicals that are the natural byproducts of the visionary experience.