Exhibition: The Confusion of Tongues!

Harry Gould Harvey IV The Confusion of Tongues! January 16 - February 27 2021 extended through March 6 2021

Installation view of front room of the gallery. The front wall has a black and white drawing framed in an ornate black frame and the hallway leads off to the left where there is an installation of a black sculpture and a small wall work on the brick wall.
 

Art in America Turning Point

Between me and youse... We lost track of the light, it flickered away Between the gray gusts of changing times. Trying to track the trails of where the birds had flown. Skimmers and seagulls chucking clams from their beaks, crackin’ Muscle shells on church spires, Smokestacks top factory peaks. We can try and rebuild from the rubble and ash beneath so long as the fires stay calm, And we can still breathe. Not a line left in the sky. Of where the birds had flown…

Bureau is pleased to announce The Confusion of Tongues!, Harry Gould Harvey IV’s first one-person exhibition with the gallery. The above poem was written by the artist and speaks of Harvey’s native Fall River, on Massachusetts’s Mount Hope Bay, once a major manufacturing hub and port city. The Confusion of Tongues! synthesizes many strands of the artist’s thinking around the history, architecture, culture and ecology of the south coast region. The exhibition features Harvey’s signature hand-framed drawings, replete with symbolic geometry and diagrammatic text, framed with carved, foraged wood. Harvey also debuts works of much larger scale, including three wooden sculptures composed of architectural supports salvaged from a Gilded Age mansion in Newport Rhode Island. The gothic vernacular that viewers are accustomed to in Harvey’s work is scaled up in these sculptures; private altars expand to grand arches and corbels. Harvey has recently begun casting small hand molded wax objects into white bronze, which bracket, support and adorn the salvaged wood structures. All the works in the exhibition bear the trace of many hours of labor by the artist, from the milling, working and carving of wood, to the minute pencil details of written text and drawing. The many bronze elements throughout the exhibition shine brightly, painstakingly polished to a mirror finish by Harvey. The comparative luster and permanence of the bronze contrasts with the ephemeral nature of the wood, which here is stripped, charred and burned black. For Harvey this process neutralizes the grandiose gothic constructions, built by anonymous laborers for robber barons, while also unearthing the wood’s embedded history and origin.

Appendix written by the artist available here

Harry Gould Harvey IV (b. 1991 Fall River, MA) lives and works in Fall River, MA. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Coniunctio, with Kyung-Me, Bureau, New York, 2019; EARTH CRISIS, with Samantha Durand, Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, 2018; Amen, Thanks Computer God!, with Jesse Sullivan, Freddy, Harris, NY, 2018; Prudence, Patience, Hope & Despair, Motel, Brooklyn, 2018; Harry Gould Harvey IV with Species, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, 2018. Harvey is a founder of the curatorial project Pretty Days and co-director of the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River, MA. Harvey is preparing for a two-person exhibition with Faith Wilding at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island for 2022.

Black and white drawing framed in an ornate black frame on a wall. The greyscale drawing had a halo of clouds around the bottom left and upper and lower right, in the center is a ruin of an industrial building with many windows that appears to be glowing from inside. There is a circular arc of text along the top.

A Plastic Bag a Vulture a Phantom of Industry, 2021,Charred 18th century English Walnut, charred Black Walnut from The Newport Mansions, MDF, beeswax, colored pencil and charcoal on archival matboard,35 ¾ × 25 ½ × 1 ¾ in

Installation view of front room of the gallery, looking down the hallway, at right, the front wall has a black and white drawing framed in an ornate black frame and the down the hallway is a black sculpture and a small wall work on the brick wall at left and a large black pyramid shape sculpture at the end of the hall in the main space.
Installation view looking down the hallway, a black sculptural installation comprising a black chapel kneeler and a two small wall works hang on the brick wall at left. At the end of the hallway a large black pyramid shape sculpture stands at the end of the hall in the main space.
Installation view of Harvey's sculptural installation in a small niche in the hallway wall comprising a black chapel kneeler and three wall works hanging on the brick wall. The central work is an ornate cast bronze gothic style object featuring arcs and hearts and pointed elements. On left and right are 2 mirrors framed in black wood, which face one another.

The Space between Your Temples Lay the House of Whose Name Could Never Be Spoken, 2021, Charred 18th century kneeler from Providence, sardine can from Portugal, used motor oil from Sinister Motorsports, charred 18th century English Walnut, charred Black Walnut from The Newport Mansions, beeswax, hand polished zinc, MDF, cast white bronze, Dimensions variable

Detail view of Harvey's sculptural installation: an ornate cast bronze gothic style object sits on a black wooden shelf with turned wood decorate elements on left and right. The central bronze object features a rounded extended arch made up of concentric peace signs, melting hearts and wavy sun rays and spiky vine forms . Underneath the black shelf is another bronze cast of twisted barbed wire or vine, and a 4 pointed anchor which is bolted to the wall.
Installation view of main gallery: at left three small colorful drawings hang, framed with ornate black wood, a pyramid shaped gothic style wooden sculpture sits at center left behind which is a black and red drawing hanging on the center wall, framed as well in black wood, at right a large wooden archway form hangs on the wall.
Installation view of main gallery: at left three small colorful drawings hang in the wall, framed with ornate black wood. To the right is a pyramid shaped gothic style wooden sculpture which is made of two giant gothic corbels placed together, at the top of the pyramid are 2 pointy cast bronze objects and a cast bronze chain connecting the two.
Installation view of three small vertical format drawings hanging on the wall all are framed in black wood with ornately carved frames. The first from the left also has barbed wire in an arc along the top edge of the frame. The drawing is black and white with accents of yellow and red, and shows concentric circles arranged geometrically, with rays of yellow sun at the top, symbols throughout, such as a red cross and red heart at center and a crescent moon and angel face which has the word 'Joy' written across the forehead. At left and right are two brick smokestacks. The two drawings on the right have solid irregular but geometric shapes in yellow, red, blue and green, as well as cartoonish angel heads with wings and haloes and the words 'Art Saves!' written in pencil.
Large wooden floor sculpture made of charred blackened wood in the shape of a pyramid or triangle. The overall roughly equilateral triangular form is made up of two right triangles . Each side is perforated with empty window holes, one, lower in a clover shape and one higher in a more pointed leaf shape. The work is adorned with cast bronze embellishments, including pointy steeples at the top.

A Proposal for a New StⒶtue of Liberty toward the Epoch of Ⓐ New ‘G*d’, 2021, Charred architectural salvage from The Newport Mansions, cast white bronze, used motor oil from Sinister Motorsports on blackened bolts, OSB, beeswax, 66 ¼ × 81 × 14 in.

Detail of a sculpture's cast bronze elements in the form of pointy steeples and a brick chimney with a polished heart at the top, all affixed to a larger charred wooden structure below.
Installation view of main gallery: at left, a pyramid shaped gothic style wooden floor sculpture behind which is a black and red drawing hanging on the center wall, framed in black wood, at right two large wooden archway forms hangs on the wall.
Large drawing framed with a charred black wood frame, which has turned wood and other embellishments. The drawing is predominantly black and red with a few hints of other colors such as blue and yellow. The drawing is organized along concentric interlocking circles, with pointed tangent lines creating steeple like forms which are shaded with a gradient of red. There is a large u shape at the top drawn in black which resembles a crescent moon, and several small black bird forms in silhouette. At center there is an interlocking knot and a wax heart surrounded by many shaded red and black cloud forms. Along the lines of the curves there are the words of a poem written in pencil.
Installation view of two charred wood decorative archways with scalloped edges.
Blackened wood archway sculpture with scalloped edges.

I Was Standing in a Window a Calling My Mother’s Name Crying Mother Mother Save Me as I Fell Back in the Flame, 2021, Charred architectural salvage from The Newport Mansions, cast white bronze, used motor oil from Sinister Motorsports on blackened bolts, OSB, beeswax, 71 ½ × 63 × 5 ½ in.

Detail view of top left of blackened wood archway sculpture. There is a square notch cut out of the wood, and in the niche is a metal L bracket that has a small tableau in cast bronze. A small webbing is at the angle joint and along the bottom is a pile of bricks, a reclining heart and a bottle, a profile of a head is on top right.
Blackened wood archway sculpture hangs on the wall. Clover shapes at top left and right are cut out of the wood, one has red filled inside it. There is a scalloped motif along the inside. Red and wood accents.

So I Hope Her Soul Has Gone to Rest and Away in Heaven She’ll Go Oh Away Away in Heaven and Away from the Burning Mills, 2021, Charred architectural salvage from The Newport Mansions, cast white bronze, acrylic, casting wax, OSB, beeswax, 71 ¼ × 62 ½ × 4 ½ in.

Detail of a wooden frame sculpture, the bottom right angle showing two melting red wax hearts. Some of the wax is dripping down to the white wooden floor.
Installation view showing two wooden frame/archway sculptures hanging on the wall, and at right foreground a black plinth with a glass vitrine on top with a model of a red church inside.
Straight on view of a black pedestal with various objects placed on top, inside a glass vitrine box. Inside the vitrine are several miniature modernist sculptures and at center a model of a simple red gothic church.

The Old Church Is in Need of Fumigation, 2021, Charred Old Growth Eastern White Pine floorboards from Fall River, Black Walnut from The Newport Mansions, Old Man's Beard, colored pencil on MDF, clay from Swans Island, steel, asbestos tile, beeswax, lead, mold, 63 × 25 ¼ × 25 ¼ in.

Detail close up of the top of a black pedestal showing red, black and wood objects, many of them covered lightly with a patina of yellow mold. At center is a model of a simple, red gothic church, to the left and right are small models of well known modernist sculptures, by Calder, and Tony Smith.
Installation view looking out from the center of the gallery towards the hallway. At left a black plinth with small red and black objects placed on top inside a glass vitrine. At left three small colorful framed drawings on the wall.
Metal object bolted into the corner of two white walls. The object depicts in bronze two interweaving vines, one with multiple spikes. At each end of the vines are small plates which have a black hexagonal bolt.

Celastrus Orbiculatus versus Smilax Rotundifolia, 2021, Cast white bronze, blackened bolts, 7 × 4 × 5 ½ in.