Artist defines cute with porcelain kittens, bunnies, dolls
“Precious” is not a compliment to most contemporary artists. Neither is “cute.” That is, unless you are Wesley Harvey, the San Antonio sculptor of kitsch whose ceramic settings are happily inhabited by the porcelain bunnies, kitties and duckies that you often find in rooms where the davenport is protected by doilies.
Here’s a young man, dressed on a cool spring afternoon in cargo shorts, tennis shoes and a black T-shirt, close-shaved, dark hair clipped short — you know, normal — who states with breathtaking unabashedness: “Kittens, butterflies and Precious Moments figurines are my love affairs.”
Harvey finds a peculiar form of salvation in the tawdry, the tasteless, the trashy.
“I blame it on my grandmother,” says the 31-year-old artist, who grew up in small-town Indiana. (“Van Buren,” he says of his hometown, which bills itself “the popcorn capital of the world” and hosts an annual popcorn festival, “didn’t even have a traffic light.”)
His grandmother “had, like, 30 or 40 pink flamingoes in the front yard, and a backyard filled with garden gnomes.”
“Now,” he says, “my house is starting to look like hers … I’ve always been a big fan of collecting things. I’ve always been attracted to the really tawdry. I really feel that more is better. I like the rococo and the baroque. I love Jeff Koons.”
San Antonio ceramics artist Diana Kersey describes Harvey’s work as “kitsch, referencing back to the true meaning of this German word for ‘pretentious trash.’ He is paying tribute to the low-brow tradition of mass produced ceramic figurines and tchotchkes, and in so doing is making fun of this tradition yet elevating it at the same time and coercing people to see them in a novel way. Kitsch is hard to pull off, and Wes does it well!”
Harvey, who went to grad school at Texas Tech and moved to San Antonio a few years ago, is showing recent work — some of it still warm from the kiln, like baked bread — in a show called “In-Appropriate” at Joan Grona Gallery through June 27.
Harvey shares the space with another of the city’s most promising young artists, Kelly O’Connor. They complement each other in their junk-shop approach to art. Both love the lush, decorative feel of rococo. O’Connor, who is 28, has called her work “conceptual crafting,” and that might describe Harvey’s, too.
O’Connor’s collages depend for much of their dynamics on a certain flea-market flair she finds in old record album covers, wallpaper patterns and cut-out images from magazines and antique cookbooks — everything from cakes to, yes, kitties. She has a special place in her heart for Disney characters and Judy Garland.