Details:
① Artwork:
Smoke Break
In this oil and acrylic painting, a nude figure gets enveloped in a blitz of brushy strokes resembling smoke. Like all the works in this series, the artist uses figure painting to address the dissonance between the influence of fixed social visions and one’s desire to break free from them.
Having stripped her figures of their accouterments and danced them effusively in the grass, Whit Harris practically blends her figures with their surroundings. Placed within archetypal experiences, her figures often deny their roles within their commonplace narratives in favor of more obscure, gestural, and uncanny portrayals.
Specs:
③ Artist:
Whit Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, and ceramics. Her work renders a dissolute experience of human bodies through fluid, disjointed anatomies. Figures stretch, recline, wriggle, twerk, and otherwise contort themselves in exaggerated expressions that oscillate between naturalistic and cartoonish, summoning the DuBoisian premise of “double consciousness” that underlies contemporary Black identity. These reinvented bodies become metaphors for the artist’s psychological adaptation to unpredictable and hostile environments borne out of anti-Black social structures and subversive totems of political resistance.
Whit Harris was born in 1985 in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, NY (2014) and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City, NY (2022).
She has mounted solo exhibitions at Artshack Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2022) and Lauren Powell Projects in Los Angeles, CA (2022).
Harris has participated in various group exhibitions, including Cycles at DIMIN in New York City, NY (2023); Potheads at Swivel Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2023); Big Reveal at Underdonk Gallery in Brooklyn, NY (2023); Somewhere in Time at Tube Culture Hall in Milan, Italy (2022); New Visions at The Love You Co. in Miami, FL (2022); and Cute Gloom at Lauren Powell Projects in Los Angeles, CA (2022).
She has been awarded residencies with Artshack (2022) and the New York Public Library (2018).