A selection of illustrations by Skylar Harvey

Artist Statement:

These pieces are explorations of the word “gestalt”. Something such as a structure or experience that, when considered as a whole, has qualities that are more than the total of all its parts. A few of these pieces are meant to be looked at together, each of them as a piece of a larger image, a larger experience. Other pieces can be broken down, themselves collections of different impressions.

The elements of a piece are like different sights one might see on a journey. When recalled later in memory, you may remember the sights, the sounds, the smells, a general narrative flow of events, but the memory itself is a mashed-up gestalt of images, time, and recollections all experienced simultaneously. So maybe that is the best way to understand these compositions. Insofar as they can be said to represent anything, they represent that gestalt. The moment where memory is experienced as a whole, undivided thing, before it is parsed into the discrete things we actually perceive and communicate to others.

Artist Narrative:

I was delighted to have the opportunity to put these pieces on show. They represent a concrete shift in both how I make art and how I think about what its meaning is to me as an artist. All of these pieces are the result of actively experimenting with the tools and approaches I use. I’ve introduced more actively using linework and perspective to draw out themes in my work over the last few months and have really enjoyed the results. As to what it means to me? When I first started dabbling in making art, I certainly didn’t set out to imbue it with any kind of ‘meaning’ or to set it within any kind of narrative structure that tells a story of any kind. But with that said, I also think that compositions like these, as non-representational as they are, still have a power to direct attention and conjure feelings in people. So that’s what I aim for. These pieces aren’t *supposed* to portray anything. They’re just meant to catch the eye and hopefully give people a ‘moment of mindfulness’ if you will. I want people to look at it, and instead of being able to assign labels, meanings, etc. to it, to just be present with the image in front of them; the colors, the shapes, the arrangements. It’s my sincere hope that people can then take that sense of mindfulness away from the art, even, and look at the world around the art in the same way. Everything we experience in the world has its own shapes, its own colors, its own compositions after all.