AC Institute’s The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected is mildly chuffed to announce the debut exhibition of Doug Harvey’s 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS, an installation of a series of two thousand and twenty small acrylic-on cardstock works completed in the year 2020.
Sheep in Wolves' Clothing is a San Diego experimental music supergroup assembled specifically for this event, and consisting of
Nathan Hubbard - percussion, drums, synth
Mathew Raker - keyboards
Dylan Lee Brown - guitar, array, mbira
Sejal Janaswamy - drums, percussion
Sidney Merritt - clarinet, Qchord, theremin, guitar
Graphically compelling, the intricate black pareidolia-inducing forms and textures recall art historical precedents from Surrealist Automatism to Chinese shanshui hua landscapes, and are intended for intimate contemplation. Collectively installed as a wall-filling grid, their combination of chaotic visual signals and precise mathematical structure conjures additional associations, including Serialism and experimental graphic narrative.
While not explicitly referencing the Trump presidency, the ongoing social upheavals surrounding racial injustice or COVID, the artist states that “it sometimes seems that all you can do in response to the hyperarticulated absurdities of contemporary society is to punch open a portal into another world with a singular post-rational gesture. Or maybe two thousand and twenty of them.”
2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS is also one of Harvey’s “reservoir” painting installations, where individual units of the piece can be replaced without affecting the overall impact of the installation. Individual paintings are therefore available for immediate cash & carry purchase at the communistic price of $20, or the whole shebang for a more capitalistic $35,000.
Following the exhibition, AC Books will publish 2020 BLACK ABSTRACT PAINTINGS: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, a 520 page volume containing reproductions of the entire image sequence presented as an experimental graphic narrative, in an edition of 100, with explanatory and interpretive texts.
Doug Harvey is an artist, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Best known in the Art World for his 15 year tenure as Lead Art Critic for LA Weekly, other journalism, and extensive body of catalog essays, he has maintained parallel practices as an independent curator and multimedia artist while steadfastly resisting vertical integration into the Academy, Marketplace, or any other Art World institution.
Harvey's art work ranges across painting, collage, found objects, film and video, performance, installation, publications, and sound. He received his MFA in Painting from UCLA in 1994 and has exhibited extensively, including over a dozen solo shows at artist-run LA galleries including POST, High Energy Constructs, and Jancar Gallery.
His ongoing series related to a set of found moldy 35mm slides (projected, printed, and displayed online) has been exhibited internationally and at venues throughout LA including The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Jancar Gallery, LA Valley College Art Gallery, another year in LA, and the California Museum of Photography.
Reviewing his solo debut at POST Gallery, St. Sebastian Tom Sawyer Cathy Mishima Expo 67, LA Times critic David Pagel wrote "Harvey’s art makes the most outlandish conspiracy theorist look like a stodgy logician." Art in America critic Constance Mallinson said of his October 2010 solo painting show Unsustainable at Jancar Gallery “Harvey’s work reeks of rot and decay.” On the occasion of Untidy, Harvey’s mid-career survey at LA Valley College, LA Times’ Christopher Knight commented “the raging torrent of modern media-culture is his medium, and the paintings, collages, drawings and sculpture seem to regard it as a revealing cesspool of bleak but salvageable fun.”
Founded in 2004 by Holly Crawford, the AC Institute’s mission is to advance the understanding of the arts through investigation, research, and education. It is an art think-tank fostering experimentation and critical discussion through events, exhibitions, and publishing. It supports and develops projects that explore a performative exchange across visual, sonic, verbal, and experiential disciplines, encouraging critical writing that challenges conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity, as well as the boundaries between the rational and subjective. The AC Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. After almost two decades in Chelsea (NYC), they opened their West Coast facility The Art "Museum" of the Tired, Poor, & Rejected in San Diego in early 2023.
Their publishing wing AC Books fosters experimentation and critical discussion by publishing unique, design-forward, books on a variety of dynamic subject matters, particularly concerning contemporary art history, criticism, and art practice, including Doug Harvey’s 2013 ‘patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, a collection of pre-existing texts subjected to extreme stress to make them reveal their hidden meanings, reprints of key documents in ‘patacritical history, and original artifacts generated from new research.
