Claudia Hart. Illuminations

About

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce Illuminations, Claudia Hart’s fifth solo exhibition. Illuminations presents a diverse body of work that pulls from the artist’s vast library of decorative patterns and icons. These symbols incorporate a variety of graphics: the heraldry of failed empires, corporate logos, linguistic pictorial symbols like emoji, mathematical signs, decorative alphabets, and tile patterns culled from world cultures. Hart uses symbols as a basic visual vocabulary to incorporate larger algorithmic patterns that she then animates. The artist’s signs and signifiers flicker, sometimes regularly and sometimes randomly, like techniques used by hypnotists to mesmerize and bring viewers into a trance state.

The Illuminations feature dynamic video works encased in decorated wooden frames. The frames are fabricated through a hybrid process in which handiwork is combined with photography and a sophisticated computer-controlled printing technique. Each Illumination contains a miniature monitor that showcases a looping video work, including both legacy pieces produced between 2002–2019 , and recent works from several concurrent series. Together, these animated paintings frame a poetic space: a meditation on the process of history, collapse and regeneration, mortality, and of art as a means of transcendence.