ACCA@MIRKA

AT TOLARNO HOTEL

DAVID HARLEY

 

 

Using amorphous gestures and layers of colour David Harley returns a fluid sensuality to the digital print.  His site-specific installations at once enhance and confound the architectonic rigour of each exhibition space.  They give the illusion of imponderable depth and suggest their own organic logic Harley’s parasitic incursions act upon the spaces around them.  They are architectural contortions; two-dimensional conceits that energetically enliven the three-dimensional spaces they inhabit.

 

Harley trained as a painter and continues to make abstract often large-scale paintings on canvas.  His installations have developed from and extend that canvas-based practice.  Where the canvases are self-contained studies in line and colour, the installations envelop the viewer and their abstract shapes shift in relation to the movement of the viewer’s own body.

 

For this work, file... #2, as in other of his installations, Harley has used Photoshop and painted with his computer rather than employing traditional painting methods and materials.  Where he might have built up a canvas with layers of acrylic, oil or spray paints, he has instead employed digital layering techniques to construct the image.  The computer screen has become an intermediary between the artist’s conception of a work and its final realisation as site-sensitive digital vinyl.  The ‘paint brush’ function and the movement of the mouse have replaced the actual paints and brush strokes.  No impersonal experience. However, file... #2 directs our attention to the architecture of the room we share with it.

 

Anna MacDonald