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 between New York and Boston to be fertile creative ground) mold two separate visions into one distinctive, final Harvey project.
For CONCEPTUALIBS, we decided to add our audience to this creative process and let them have a voice in new conceptual works. To this end, we created an interface much like childrens’ mad-libs that asked for the input of simple words: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The resulting CONCEPTUALIB presented a work of conceptual art as a collaboration between Harvey Loves Harvey and the viewer, with a unique project number, description of the finished work and a photo.
For our ONE SQUARED show at Oni Gallery in Boston, we installed three computer monitors in the gallery, displaying the most recent CONCEPTUALIBS as framed artwork — thus our audience not only collaborated with us, but the work was shown in a gallery with other Harvey Loves Harvey collaborations.