What would you do if you had an endless vacation? Samantha and her friends are about to find out, when they arrive at a cabin that won’t let them leave. Every time they walk away, they appear back inside. What starts as a strange problem turns deadly as they learn the true meaning of a […]
For the 48 Hour Film Project Boston 2016, we created this short film titled “Life After Goremaxx.” The categories we drew were Coming Of Age Story and/or Martial Arts Film. The required line of dialog was “What’s that supposed to mean?” The required prop was an envelope, and the required character was Pierre or Paulette […]
It was just a scrap of paper, a small photograph lost behind a dresser, a picture of a man sunning himself on the beach. It might be just another family vacation snapshot from a time long ago, were the man not Charles Egan and the photographer not Aaron Siskind. This exhibition began as a collaboration […]
In August of 2012, Harvey Loves Harvey escaped to a cabin in the woods of Vermont for a week. Our collaboration spans two cities and states, so we rarely qualify for artist residencies. So we made our own. The cabin was solar-powered, with no phone reception and far from any town. It was the perfect […]
“It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.” – Voltaire Marking the northern boundary of the United States is a line. Its placement is almost arbitrary, the result of colonial wars and the pronouncements of kings. Yet, to cross this line is incredibly significant: […]
4 live performances cut live to vinyl! For over 100 years, man has worked to find new and better ways of preserving sound. From the invention of wax cylinders and records, to vinyl discs, magnetic tape and digital playback. For each new way of recording, another becomes outdated. On Saturday, October 8th, intervention artists Harvey […]
At the outset of the American Civil War (1861-1865), Americans on both sides of the conflict expected that it would be a short war. Even after the initial battles, and their foreshadowing of a long and bitter war, men still rushed to join both armies. As the war dragged on, into 1862 and then 1863, […]
For our exhibition What Are We Doing? at Gallery Kayafas in January of 2011, we showed the final version of our piece “Would Sol LeWitt Approve?” For that piece, we created a musical response to the work of Sol LeWitt by performing all permutations of four guitar chords. For the opening reception of our exhibition, we invited the band Soccer Momto perform […]
What would it have been like to have stumbled upon the legendary jazz musician Sonny Rollins playing in the 1960s on the Williamsburg bridge? Harvey Loves Harvey attempted to recreate the experience playing the Sonny Rollins album The Bridge in the center of the Williamsburg bridge, between September 13th and 20th as part of The Work Office, a […]
This video piece was part of a two-part exhibition co-presented by MASS MoCA and Cabinet Magazine, curated by Regine Basha, who asked the question: This is a call to those who share an affinity with Sol LeWitt’s legacy as a conceptual artist, to those who knew him and those who did not — to anyone who has ever […]
When I speak, are you listening? If you hear me, do you know what I’m saying? When looking back on our explorations of the different forms of communication, HLH wanted to reduce the experience, strip it down and remove anything but the basic form — the simple speaking and hearing that makes for dialogue. We […]
Buy the 14 Actions For 14th Street book Click here for the “14 Actions For 14th Street” website (Flash, HTML) ACROSS 14TH STREET Over four days in October of 2009, collaborative artists Harvey Loves Harvey created fourteen performance art interventions along 14th Street in Manhattan. Each of these vignettes was created based on a moment in the history […]
In 2009 Harvey Loves Harvey finished work on a documentary based on Ross McElwee’s award-winning 1986 film Sherman’s March. This project, titled After Sherman’s March begins: “Sometimes I drink a little too much, and I order stuff on Amazon. Packages arrive and I don’t know what they are. This one, it seems, is a film I watched with my […]
For The 48 Hour Film Project Harvey Loves Harvey worked with a great team of artists and filmmakers to produce “A Heart Divided” — a Civil War bromance. Over the course of 2 days, HLH wrote and starred in the piece, which was directed by Jeffu Warmouth and Paul Concemi; produced by James Manning, edited by Charlie Roberts, shot […]
We often take history as a fixed and permanent, a series of narratives built from obvious origins and leading to inevitable conclusions. History is told to us in the voice of its time, and thus we consider the wars of Greece through the voice of Homer, or the American Revolution in the language of the […]
“As a matter of principle, there seems to be good reason to expand the public forum well beyond streets and parks. In the modern era, other places have increasingly come to occupy the role of traditional public forums. The mass media, including the Internet, have become far more important than streets and parks as arenas […]
What does it mean to hang a “wanted” poster on a lamp-post? What can be communicated by a Xeroxed flier with tear-off tags bearing a phone number? In our hyper-paranoid world, how much attention are people actually paying to the world around them? If you see something, will you say something? For “WANTED!” the members […]
On September 10, 2001, Harvey Loves Harvey were in Boston celebrating Jason’s birthday. We spent the day in Hyde Square for the annual festivities, watching mariachi bands, drinking beer and spending time with close friends. As was our custom, Matt had given Jason tickets to see Unwound the next night — repayment for tickets a year previous […]
Civil Warcraft is an online project by artists Harvey Loves Harvey. This site presents a series of maps created for the game Warcraft III that can be downloaded and played by anyone. Each map presents a battle from the American Civil War, designed to be as historically accurate as possible. Each map features over 1000 […]
This piece presents the two members of Harvey Loves Harvey as they wait for input from the audience. Viewers can choose either Jason or Matt by pressing arcade buttons. Once a Harvey is chosen, they are either given money or have some taken away, and they respond accordingly. Is there any value in winning? What […]
Responding to a series of questions from the Praxis project, Harvey Loves Harvey created a set of video shorts in answer to some questions. The best of these was the video resonding to the question: “What do you have the most passion for, and why?” In this video, we have adapted our artist-as-businessman identity for a sleazier, […]
Harvey Loves Harvey is teaming up with the great Lee Walton to solve a mystery. It will take all three men, because this one is tricky. Having procured a copy of Louis Bromfield’s The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg, this mystery was cut into thirds and distributed among the artists. Each artist read their section, and then […]
This collaborative project by Harvey Loves Harvey proposes to explore the role of creativity in the making of artworks, and to test the possibility of a meta-creator that can supersede or negate artistic intention and ideology. This device will serve as the source of ‘inspiration’, dictating pre-described instructions to the artists, who will act merely […]
This project proposes a series of images generated by instructions from a machine designed and built by Harvey Loves Harvey. It is a continuation of a series of ‘Harvey machines’ that serve as meta-artists, and is intended to result in a photographic series. For this project, Harvey Loves Harvey will create a database of phrases […]
This piece was created as a variation of the full-sized “Naughty Or Nice?” piece for a specific installation context. The Edible Art fundraising event requested a Harvey Loves Harvey piece, and we decided to re-make “Naughty Or Nice?” using food (to fit the theme of the event). Thus, like “Naughty Or Nice?”, “Eat Or Be […]
In our daily lives we are presented with many options at any given moment. How does society keep order? What is it, other than fear of punishment, that influences these decisions in our every interaction? Social order among a group of individuals is imposed by the state, but there is also another powerful force at […]
Brands distinguish things from one another. In marketing, essentially anything can be considered a brand, from a pack of gum or a tube of toothpaste to a magazine, a school, an airline, a hospital, or a country. NBC is a brand. So is Newsweek. Harvard, as one of the world’s most prestigious universities, has done […]
After years of working together, it became clear that the boundaries of Harvey Loves Harvey as an artistic collaboration were being stretched in many directions, and that the core friendship of the two artists was being sacrificed. To this end, Harvey Loves Harvey created a set of legal documents that define their role in each […]
At a lecture we gave at the Museum School in Boston, people would ask us about the “Harvey Versus Harvey” event (a mispronunciation of our name). People inherently thought we must be in competition with one another, so we decided to also examine the idea of a clear winner in an “alter ego” version of […]
Harvey Loves Harvey are co-founding members of The Number Foundation, a New York based collective of artists and illustrators. A major project of The Foundation since 1996 has been the publication of a magazine. Originally called The Number Foundation Magazine, it was re-issued in 2000 under the name Royal Flush with an extravagant party at […]
During the creation of the CONTROL pieces, Harvey was often challenged on the ‘truth’ of their projects – a fact that was not lost on the same artists already engaged in the ‘two sides of the same story’ project in Extra-Medium. In resonse, methods were sought to verify the works as authentic. The first project […]
With inspiration from Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and a high speed internet connection, Harvey placed a pile of candy on a shelf, which was being monitored on the Harvey Loves Harvey website by a webcam, which would update at predetermined intervals. The candy was meant to be taken and online viewers would attempt to catch the thief […]
The television show “America’s Funniest Home Videos” began as soon as the camcorder became affordable for the average family. It is quite possibly one of the longest running reality shows on television, and shows no sign of getting canceled anytime soon. It has relied on the pain can be funny formula for years, a majority […]
The process of creating work is, for Harvey, a complicated game of give-and-take. Each person brings a seed of an idea, a need that they must fulfill creatively, and a vision of what the final work should be. Long conversations over the phone, via email, and in the car (we consider the stretch of I-95 […]
Harvey Loves Harvey is certainly not the first artistic approach to communication, and there is a very long history of the failures of language in academia, literature, theatre and cinema. One of our favorites is Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s On First?” comedy routine. For W.O.F.?, we decided to use this routine as the ideal […]
During the finalization of the PROOF project, Harvey was invited to participate in a mail-art show in Texas. The theme of the show was ‘Rivers and Bridges’, and works could be loosely based on that subject. Using similar methods to PROOF, A SMALL ACT OF PROOF lasted for five mailings before it was forwarded to […]
Freud talked about the “uncanny”, where certain things would resonate primally as unexplainably disturbing: twins, feelings of deja vu. In ‘COULD HARVEY BE HARVEY’, we were trying to create a moment of uncanny for the viewer. At first glance everything appears normal but there is something not quite right. We repeated a conversation about literally […]
The novels of Paul Auster, and his friendship with Sophie Calle, have been a steady source of inspiration to Harvey Loves Harvey. Auster writes frequently of characters that follows others for extended periods, hoping to understand them through their movements. In his novel Leviathan, his narrator follows the character Ben Sachs for days through the […]
Created for an online exhibition in conjunction with a Chicago-based event titled [inter]PERSONAL, “AVATARi” was the first extended CONTROL project of the Harvey Loves Harvey :: Year One website. Inspired by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and particularly the idea of an ‘avatar’ that serves as one’s virtual representation in cyberspace, Harvey undertook the project of […]
In the spring of 2001, HLH’s Matthew Nash — in collaboration with artist Joel Alpern — created “Reproduction.” This piece was performed at 1926 Gallery in Chicago. For “Reproduction,” the artists secured a photocopier and put a sign on the sidewalk reading “free copies.” Anyone passing by could ask for free copies of any piece […]
From 1999 to 2001, Harvey Loves Harvey was separated by more space than usual, as Nash lived in Chicago and Dean remained in New York. At the time, the Internet was coming to maturity, and there were many promises made about what the future would hold. In this exciting time, HLH started trying to test […]
Jason Dean created a cow for NYC’s “Cows On Parade” public art event. For this project, fiberglass cows were given to artists to decorate or work with, and installed throughout the city. Dean’s cow, titled “The Cow Friends Network” presented a speaker with a button, and pressing the button called the cell phone of the […]
There is a simple phrase, with many variations, that we’ve all heard many times: “Like banging your head against a wall.” It is a raw and illustrative description of frustration, and of the sheer futility of so much of life. Harvey Loves Harvey created “Bang Head Here” out of that frustration. The piece is deceptively […]
In 1991, David Cronenberg’s film “Naked Lunch” hit the art theatres. While not the first time that nostalgia for the Beats popped up in the mainstream, the film had great impact on the boys of Harvey. As the Beats re-entered the mainstream over the next few years, their ideas and methods thoroughly saturated the project […]
In Rochester, NY, in the early ’90’s, the Pyramid Arts Center was the center of Harvey’s world. Filling the top floor of a mall converted from a brewery, Pyramid had space, art and attitude. For a small city like Rochester, it brought in interesting work by big-name contemporary artists, and maintained an open relationship with […]
