Refigured

Auriea Harvey’s installation represents an “origin story” of the artist’s online identity. It consists of Ox, a physical sculpture, and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis), a 3D model in an HTML environment with an augmented reality (AR) component. Harvey has worked online from the inception of Internet art and has combined her experience in video game and software development with a sculptural practice in mixed reality. She sees the digital models as the core of the work and the physical sculptures as their extension. 

The sculpture depicts a trio of characters: its “crown” is Fauna, which is based on a scan of Harvey’s head and functions as the ancestor character from which the other two forms originate; Ox, the central body of the work, in turn derives from a scan of Fauna; and Ox embraces Minoriea, a figure that has been the artist’s avatar in virtual worlds since 2017. The sculpture embodies both the history of the artist’s virtual self-representation and her work process, which combines scans from physical objects and people with 3D models based on her own clay sculptures or digitally sculpted works of imagination, resulting in characters with distinct narratives.