There are two things, no three, to know about the British-born, Brooklyn-dwelling artist Ellen Harvey: she's brilliant; she's highly accomplished; and she's a relentless reinventor.

I'll never forget when Ellen painstakingly produced miniature paintings of every single work in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum. (I recall walking through the show and shaking my head in disbelief.) She's also done a 2,000-square-foot mosaic for a subway station in Long Island City.

And I loved the concept of her recent exhibit (which just closed a week ago) at the Bass Museum in Miami: "The Nudist Museum," an exploration of historical representations of, well, nakedness. Ellen "copied" every nude in the Bass collection (fifty-four in all), but the paintings were creatively embellished and interpreted, and the images spilled over onto the ornate second-hand frames in which they were displayed. Stunning.

Her new gallery show, "The Natural Order of Things," has just opened in New York. It isn't so much a group show as a duo show. Its theme broadly investigates the relationship between our daily lives and the role of art in the contemporary world. The other featured artist, Jason Middlebrook, recycles and transforms discarded materials--such as found wooden planks--into installations and even furniture.

His objects are found; Ellen's surfaces are borrowed. It's all very DIY and ReadyMade-approved.

Her work was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and she is represented by galleries in New York, Philadelphia, Brussels, and Berlin. Recently I interviewed Ellen--and as ever, her responses were witty and thought-provoking.

RM: Can you tell me about the New York Beautification Project, images of which are represented in the current show? For this project, you "tagged" sites around New York City with 5 x 7 oval oil landscape paintings--on stairwells, dumpsters, lampposts, and more.

Ellen Harvey: It came into being because I really wanted to make public art and no one was asking me to make any. I didn't have a venue, so I just decided to make my own. Also, this was the time when Mayor Giuliani was really cracking down on graffiti, and I thought that it was a bit sad that the discussion about disorderly sites was so generally negative.

I saw these "unclaimed" sites as being places that allowed for self-expression in a way that was just not possible anywhere else. I was interested creating a conversation about what made something "graffiti" and what made something "art."

I was curious to see if little oval landscapes painted in oils would be treated the same way as more conventional tags--I wanted to see if a very conventional aesthetic would trump the illegality of the action. Also, as a white woman in her 30s, my project was partly about who is allowed to speak in public in our society. I doubt I would have had such a generally positive experience had I been part of another demographic.  

EH: It was my first venture outside the studio--I was pretty much a studio painter up to then.  

Strangest experiences: the guy who threatened to destroy my painting if I wouldn't paint his truck; the brother of one of the graffiti artists whose work I was tagging--he was worried that I didn't have a clue (no crew, and the image too small to be seen from a car).  

Funniest: one of my neighbors sold his car--I had thought it was abandoned--with my work on with a sign "Original artwork by Ellen Harvey: $500, car included." 

Scariest: when the police mistook me for a homeless person.

EH: It started getting a lot of press, and I didn't want to end up in jail like a lot of graffiti artists. Also, 40 paintings seemed like a nice round number. Not as good as 100, but still respectable.

EH: I've seen the one in the South Bronx and in Greenpoint recently.  Most are painted over, or the object on which they were painted is gone.

EH: Most people were very kind and enjoyed discussing the piece. I'm not an aggressive person, so if anyone objected to a painting, I just removed it, but that only happened once. All 40 paintings represented a kind of public consensus that painting a small landscape on that particular site was somehow okay.  

EH: I don't like repeating projects, so I won't be doing this project again--although I have been asked. I don't miss the project. It's done. Next time I'll do something completely different.

You can visit Ellen's website to view more of her projects.
 

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