Harley Ives is an inventive and thoughtful video artist. If the contemporary is at least in one sense defined by a new approach to history, Ives embodies this ambivalence. The past, present and future all conflate into the now, where linear art history dissolves all together into an overall equivalence. The most immediate response to Ives work is that he is in some way “returning” video, or at least the picture on the screen, to painting. This is definitely true and he mines the genres of painting to make this connection explicit: the sublime waterfall, flowers in a vase in portrait format, various landscapes in landscape format.
