Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists in the “identity art” niche. She still examines identity, but updated through the scrim of technology. Claudia’s art is about issues of the body, perception, and nature collapsing into technology and then back again. Everything is fluid in it including gender. She considers it Cyborg-ish. She creates liminal spaces, an overused word she knows, but, she’s in love with the interface between real and unreal because it is space of contemplation and transformation. Claudia Hart was an early adopter of virtual imaging, which means using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, then later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR, and objects using computer-driven production machines, all based on the same computer models. She thought of as a pioneer, having taken a feminist position in a world without women when she started 20 years ago. She was totally dedicated to this position, mainly out of necessity, inspired by the French media artists of the 60s. Claudia still makes things that are not ephemeral: “mediated objects” (digitally enabled sculptures, drawings, paintings, wallpaper, conceptual crafts), projections on painted walls, and ultimately on human bodies wearing sculptural screens of some sort. She has produced bodies of work shown in galleries that inspire performances which are also shown in the experimental theater and performance context. Her work is symbolic and poetic, not narrative, but vaguely so, and is mesmerizing, hypnotic and formalist (she’s into beauty). Bodies or natural forms like flowers always appear in it. Her new piece, Alice Unchained, will premiere at the Pompidou in 2018/19. It is the end of a trilogy loosely inspired by Alice in Wonderland, featuring queered, cloned Alices, currently 11 of them. What Claudia does is often called “post photography.” But the things in her worlds are generated from computer models instead of captured with a camera. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches, she developed a pedagogic program based on this concept. Experimental 3D is the first art-school curriculum dedicated solely to teaching simulations technologies in an art-world context. Her students have driven a wedge into the art world, making her art-life very active because she often shows with my former students. Claudia Hart works with Transfer gallery and bitforms gallery, both in New York and is married to the Austrian media artist Kurt Hentschlager. She lives in New York and Chicago and she is a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This artist has been selected by the guest curator Doo Eun Choi as part of her ArtJaws collection entitled “#BODY #morph”.
