Visiting guest artist SHARON HARPER

The Art Institute of Boston
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
1:30pm

Moon Studies and Star Scratches, No.1
July - October, 2003
New York, New York; Boston, Massachusetts
Copyright Sharon Harper

Sharon Harper uses photographs and video to record a subjective experience of landscape. Geographically descriptive elements in the work transform, giving way to a psychological, interior rendition of the natural world. Technology has a dual purpose in the work. It interferes with a direct experience of nature by mediating the encounter, yet it offers perceptual experiences unseen and unattainable without it via camera optics, high-speed trains and nighttime digital vision. This work seeks out the spirit of the experiences celebrated by the Transcendentalists in a landscape irrevocably altered by technology while offering perceptual experiences that new technology affords. It engages traditional notions of the sublime and re-evaluates them in the context of the contemporary natural world in an experiential manner.

Harper received an MFA in photography and related media from the School of Visual Art in New York in 1997 and a BA from Middlebury College in literary studies. She has had solo exhibitions at Rick Wester Fine Art (2010), NY, Marcel Sitcoske Gallery in San Francisco, Savage Art Resources in Portland, Oregon, and the Goethe Institute in New York, among others. Her work was also included in the Greater New York exhibition at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in February 2000.

Harper’s work is in permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Portland Art Museum, and Bayerische Vereinsbank. She was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, in 2002 and she has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She received a Meredith S. Moody Residency Fellowship at Yaddo, the Sam and Dusty Boynton Residency Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center, and a Film Study Center Fellowship at Harvard University in 2006.