Exhibitions & Collections
Intangible Assets: Recent Work by Josh Harlan - On view at 675 Third Avenue through November 11, 2021
For Intangible Assets: Recent Work by Josh Harlan the artist has featured three distinct bodies of work: “Household Income and Math Scores” (2021), “Katya” (2020), and “Nine Years Since the Crisis” (2019).
Harlan drew inspiration from charts, diagrams, and data visualizations related to finance, media, telecommunications, transportation, government, and other sectors. The artworks were developed digitally, using image viewers like Preview and spreadsheet viewers like Excel to capture or create data visualizations. The artist then extracted fragments or “data cuts” and stripped away all signifiers of the original function or purpose of the data. He sampled color schema from historical artwork or commercial illustrations and applied those colors to the data cuts. These manipulations are executed in vector graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator and outputted as digital files. The completed work was fused to aluminum panel in a 400-degree heat-transfer, dye sublimation process.
The exhibition title, Intangible Assets, references the dual quality of his works: on the one hand, the abstractions harbor strong formal and aesthetic qualities, and on the other hand, they impart a lingering sense, conveyed by the highly structured nature of the resulting images, of some kind of significance, a dissonance, or encoded meaning that lies just beyond reach.
Biennial 2021: Palm Beach Cultural Council - Katya 1 and 11 (2020) exhibited in Biennial 2021 (March - May 2021)
Josh Harlan was among 30 artists featured in the “Biennial 2021” exhibition presented by the Palm Beach Cultural Council. The exhibition was on view at the Cultural Council’s headquarters in downtown Lake Worth Beach.
The juried exhibition, which occurs every two years, featured a diverse set of works by professional Palm Beach County artists. The “Biennial” was curated by Aldeide Delgado, a Cuban-born, Miami-based independent Latinx curator and founder & director of Women Photographers International Archive.
“The selected artists for this exhibition work in a wide range of media, often challenging the traditional boundaries of painting, video, photography and installation,” said Aldeide Delgado, guest curator.
Selected from over 150 visual artist submissions, Josh Harlan’s “Katya” series was featured in the exhibition. The series explores changes in daily movements by people in various metro areas following the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, based on location tracking data from cell phones. The series references a data visualization and aggregate data set published in the New York Times in spring of 2020.
Facebook, Menlo Park, CA - Spectrum Fragments (Site-specific installation commissioned and acquired by Facebook, Inc. in August 2018 as part of their corporate collection)
East Hampton Library, East Hampton, New York - Data is Art/Art is Data (Solo Exhibition, August 15-29, 2016)
