Auriea Harvey’s solo show Gray Matter presents a body of work emerging from an undefined and fluid ambient, where mud-like protoplasm is molded from a neutral background, solidifying into metaphysical apparitions. These data-based objects are marked by the memory of their material roots, similarly to archeological artifacts or witnesses. Indeed, the artist plays with the tools of archaeological research in the creation of her mythology and methodology. Auriea uses polygons in place of plaster, staging a non-literal and paradoxical practice of casting in a ping-ponging circularity from the sensual world to the digital one and back again. As in Pompeii’s casts, where the transition from the void left by an incinerated body is impressed into the durable matter of a plaster form, the artist seeks that continuum in the tension between ethereal and corporal, attempting to answer the question: what is this void made of? — Gaia Bobò
