1: Installation view of Nenuphar, Salon 94 Bowery and Salon 94 Freemans, New York NY
2: Harvest Richmond, 2013
3: Harvest Manassas, 2013
Harvest was first exhibited in the recital Nenuphar at Salon 94, New York, a body of work that engaged with the affinities between the lives of the artist Yves Klein (1928–1962) and George Washington Carver (1864–1943), a former slave who rose to prominence as a revered agricultural chemist and inventor, and who was also a practising painter who developed his own paint pigments. This body of work makes wide-ranging references to botany, agriculture, religion, music and ancient Egypt, which are expressed with reference to the four elements according to Classical philosophy: earth, fire, air, and water. Harvest is a suite of five sculptures formed from irregular spheres of glass hand-blown through the wire teeth of apple pickers, which casts the common farm tool as a collector of ‘air’. The work also makes reference to Klein’s notion of ‘le Vide’ (the Void) and Carver’s research into varied aspects of agriculture and alternative farming methods.