DOUG HARVEY

"Doug Harvey's work mixes everything from paint to peanuts to foam, from painting to installation to sound. Things find their way to consensus no matter how different they seem. Aware of the inevitability of consensus, Harvey pushes his ideas toward its polar opposite. Each of Harvey's materials is specifically and intentionally chosen purely for its physical and metaphysical potentialities. However, the overall consensus in his work is always speculative. Beyond each of his abstracted painted depictions there perhaps lies a story, perhaps not. The state of wonder this provokes is ironically associated with a sense of loss. Doug Harvey brings into his frame an abundance of visual possibilities, without mapping their relationships or locating them within a specific story. His work carries out a sense of detachment from any historical background, and has no specific reference to any other style or iconography. It intends exactly the opposite: to ramify all possible ends, and to distance art from a determinate point. The innumerable possibilities in his art's departure allow it to create a consensus and closure within itself. This ironic movement of art as an end in itself is also an indicator of a sense of time that is always present. The specificity of a constantly present time in Harvey's work is both humorous and tragic"