Ellen Harvey is a British-born conceptual artist whose work ranges from guerrilla street interventions like her iconic New York Beautification Project , for which she painted miniature landscapes over New York’s graffiti sites, to immersive institutional installations and large-scale public artworks. Her work is painting-based but utilizes a wide variety of media and participatory strategies to explore several reoccurring themes such as the social and ecological implications of the picturesque, the revolutionary potential of nostalgia, the conflict between advertising and ornament in public space, the relationship between art and tourism and the role of art and the artist in our society.
She refers to this work pithily as two systems of representations of leaves: a painted forest and neoclassical architectural leaf-based ornaments. But what kind of “museum” is this? Or is it another case of Harvey subversively holding up the mirror (a favorite element in her work) to what museums are, aren’t, could, or couldn’t be, something quintessentially her style, as can be seen in various of her projects, including A Whitney for the Whitney, The Museum of Failure and The Nudist Museum Gift Shop. So this work too is a “collection,” and collecting and preserving is much of what museums do. And what’s collected and preserved here, albeit against the background of a painted landscape (another museum favorite) are decorative leaf moldings, a truly mundane contrast to – and perhaps humorous critique of – the decorative arts galleries that sadly so often unfrequented. Hence Harvey’s elevation of these mundane forms to fine art status is also at one with the whimsical path forged by Duchamp and his progeny.
