Ellen Harvey: Mirror

Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts
Essays by Alex Baker and Shamim Momin.

The artist best known for her New York Beautification Project--40 lozenge-shaped miniature landscapes illicitly painted on urban surfaces in public spaces around New York City from 1999 to 2001--has gone legit and gone indoors with Mirror, a site-specific installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Playing off the Academy's Victorian architecture and academic traditions, in which students copy works of art, Harvey literally holds a mirror up to Frank Furness' Victorian Gothic architecture, copying the image of his interior stair hall as a nearly life-size reverse engraving on mirror. The glass is illuminated from behind so the engraved lines glow, and the resulting nearly 360-degree drawn environment is anchored by a video projection of Harvey creating the work. Mirror documents and puts in context Harvey's most ambitious site-specific work to date, and also serves as a mini-monograph, a short survey of her career, highlighting projects from 1998 to the present with brief descriptions written by the artist.