StandardVision Spotlight: Geometric Abstraction and Liminal Space from Multidisciplinary Artist Dev Harlan

Dev Harlan is a multidisciplinary artist working within the mediums of sculpture, installation, and digital media. His current practice is a captivating blend of sculpture and digital projection. A self-educated artist and designer, his work is rooted in personal exploration and self-initiated practices. For works like his Aero Gardens I & II—currently on display at the immersive 8K lobby screen inside the US Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles—Harlan’s deliberate use of polychromatic color palettes and geometric patterns encourages the viewer to enter into a liminal mode of awareness, allowing for perception of the dimensional relationship between surface and light. StandardVision recently spoke to Dev Harlan about his background and creative process:

SV: How would you describe your work to someone who may not be familiar with it?

DH: My work has taken a lot of different directions but what I do most often is a combination of sculpture and digital media in the form of large video projection sculptures. Themes in these works range from the geometric to the geological, for instance polyhedral shapes, or replicas of natural stone. I use vibrant color fields and simple patterns to closely articulate sculptural surfaces. The slow, rhythmic color cycles and meditative mood can be understood in relation to phenomenology, perception, and activation of the sublime unconscious. 

I  also produce digital 3D work in the form of stills, animations and immersive video with themes related to landscape, land transformation and anthropogenic change. In recent work I juxtapose the 3D terrain of a copper mine with the pristine surface of Mars. My work also explores the visual poetry found in  natural geological processes. I make 3D scans of natural stone and create hyperreal renderings of them as a way to share the beauty in the quotidian. 

SV: You mainly work at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and digital media. Can you tell us a bit about your process and how you came to work in this way?

DH: After several years of working with digital animation and creative coding I began to feel limited by the screen and wanted to do more IRL. Projection mapping was a natural transition for me, and I was drawn to the phenomenology of work with light on surfaces. This also helped me to think through and develop a sculptural practice. As my comfort with object making grew, I began making more sculptural work without video projection but that still shared a common visual and conceptual narrative with the digital work. 

Screen-based 3D work still remains an important part of what I do however, and my most recent work is taking a turn in the hyperreal direction and incorporates more ambiguity between physical and digital realities. To accomplish this I have been doing a lot of photogrammetry to capture real world sites and objects—for instance, scanning desert locations or natural stone. I have incorporated 3D scans of Martian terrain from data sets made publicly available by NASA/JPL. I am also relying on nascent GPU rendering and physically-based lighting which allows me to work more intuitively. 

All these approaches to image making and object making have become interconnected in a sort of strange loop of creative process. Sometimes sculptures inspire 3D animations, and sometimes digital ideas become a new sculpture. I am always finding novel ways to juxtapose ideas and new processes to incorporate.

SV: I’ve read that you are a self-taught artist but have found ways to channel your creative process into commercial projects. Can you explain a little more about how being self-taught has informed your work and the projects you choose to work on?

DH: Yes I am a mostly self-taught artist. I was homeschooled as a child, and ended up taking a few foundational art classes at the community college when I was a teenager, but I subsequently dropped out to go work in the nascent dot-com boom in San Francisco. It was there that I was exposed to the Bay Area’s radical experimental video art and hacker subculture. I began producing video work very intuitively and screened at events and video salons. I also began to teach myself the design and digital media tools that I would use both professionally and artistically. 

I have always worked at this complicated intersection between art and design and when I first began, I think I made little distinction between the two. The things I was making had little to no commercial intention, but the design world responded favorably and my work would occasionally find commercial value. I subsequently moved to New York and co-founded a design and motion studio based on this hybrid practice of experimental video, creative coding, and 3D animation. 

It was being exposed to the New York art world that I came to better understand contemporary art and perhaps what having an art practice actually meant. A few residencies were transformative for me, for instance at the former Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Scottsdale, and the SVA Sculpture and New Media Fellowship in NY. Now I have what I would call an interdisciplinary art practice where I am continually researching new ideas, experimenting with new methods and am engaged in a continual process of learning and unlearning. I often take online courses that I feel may be stimulating or helpful. And I also still operate in a hybrid way between art and commercial design where, on the best days, I am able to choose to work on projects that are artistically and intellectually satisfying.  

SV: Your work is distinct and really quite diverse. Are there any recurring elements or concepts you tend to explore, and if not, what influences or inspires your pieces?

 DH: Thank you. Certainly one recurring theme for me is geometric abstraction and my sculptures or renderings often attempt to reproduce idealized mathematical forms such as polyhedra or tessellated surfaces. I love the polyhedra because you can think of them as sort of cosmic mathematical ready-mades. This is because they are not ‘invented’ but rather discovered, implicit in the language of mathematics. They are also anti-historical in that they could be discovered by any intelligent life anywhere. In this sense the polyhedron becomes a reference to the idea of universals that exist outside of human experience, a part of ‘nature’ that defies anthropocentrism.

 During a few residencies in the Southwest I of course explored work which responded to the landscape and the natural formations of rocks and minerals. These rocks also thwart our anthropocentric worldview by recording timescales and forces far outside human lifespans.  In the desert the geology is all right there at the surface and I began reproducing it in various ways. I made rubber molds and castings of rock surfaces, I did a lot of photography and 3D scanning. I did some aerial photography using a weather balloon. Aerial photography, and of course satellite photography, I find very captivating, and I began looking at photography of the Martian surface which is very beautiful as well.

Spending time in the desert you also encounter the sort of abrupt disruption that happens with land use, extraction, infrastructure projects and the like, and I have captured and documented these things as part of my process as well. Making a corollary between the boulder strewn landscapes of the Southwest and the bare mineral surface of Mars I began to also think about what this sort of abrupt anthropogenic change would look like on another planet. Some of my more recent digital films explore these ideas specifically and the implications of non-terrestrial art.

SV: Do you have any thoughts on the developments of installation or digital media art as they relate to the current state of the world?

DH: I’m sure on everyone’s mind here is the cultural impacts of the pandemic, and specifically screen based culture. For better or worse I think there has been an unexpected turning point and a new kind of acceptance of digital media art. More time spent on screens has meant more people creating new digitally native work and many more people spending time experiencing digital work. I also see new IRL work and exhibitions being informed by dialogs and aesthetics formed in a digitally native context, and that boundary is becoming more fluid. This fluidity also seems to be becoming more acceptable within mainstream institutions.

The other major transformation within digital media art is the explosion of the NFT marketplace and I can’t help but see this and the pandemic amplification of screen time as intertwined. The tokenized art phenomenon is all very complicated and fraught to say the least, so I’ll just limit myself to a couple pros and cons. 

First, as an artist working with video for two decades, there has never been a straightforward way to monetize digital art. This has been the biggest hurdle with galleries and collectors - digital art just doesn’t sell the way sculpture or painting does. The emergence of a digitally native method for transacting digital art finally presents a solution that there seems to be broad consensus around, and that is a welcome change. However the way it is being hyped right now feels very crass, speculative, overconfident and full of idealistic platitudes. It is largely being driven by a few startup platforms who champion work with little cultural value,  trending towards bite sized one liners and shallow spectacle. And these platforms suffer serious flaws in terms of perpetuating exclusivity, privilege and gross inequity. I hope and expect for the market to mature eventually and become a normalized and equitable means for all artists to make a livelihood. 

SV: Any exciting upcoming projects for this year?

DH: Yes, I am excited to begin fabrication on a large steel polyhedral sculpture that will be coming to Santa Clarita this summer as part of the city’s public art program. Also I look forward to releasing a series of new digital films later this year which are based on sites I have documented and explore more of this ambiguous terrain between the real, the hyperreal and the imagined. 

Dev Harlan’s Aero Gardens I & II are currently playing on the immersive 8K lobby screen inside the US Bank Tower in Downtown Los Angeles. You can learn more about Harlan and his work by visiting his website.