Ellen Harvey Mirror

The artist best known for her New York Beautification Project--40 lozenge-shaped miniature landscapes illicitly painted on urban surfaces in public spaces around New York City from 1999 to 2001--has gone legit and gone indoors with Mirror,a site-specific installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Playing off the Academy's Victorian architecture and academic traditions, in which students copy works of art, Harvey literally holds a mirror up to Frank Furness' Victorian Gothic architecture, copying the image of his interior stair hall as a nearly life-size reverse engraving on mirror. The glass is illuminated from behind so the engraved lines glow, and the resulting nearly 360-degree drawn environment is anchored by a video projection of Harvey creating the work. Mirrordocuments and puts in context Harvey's most ambitious site-specific work to date, and also serves as a mini-monograph, a short survey of her career, highlighting projects from 1998 to the present with brief descriptions written by the artist.Harvey, Ellen is the author of 'Ellen Harvey Mirror', published 2006 under ISBN 9780943836287 and ISBN 094383628X.