This month’s artist is Natalie O’Harra from Yucaipa, CA. I can remember Natalie as a young talented artist in my community art class in Running Springs, CA over 20 years ago. I think she was in the first or second grade and I remember thinking… this kid has got it!
In my work I am exploring the potential of mundane, off-the-shelf materials by situating them in new spaces and with new purposes. Physical materials that can be bought at the dollar store and the grocery store. Or digital materials that can be found in an image search or on YouTube. I am attracted to materials that are everyday and common but have the potential to be more than everyday and common. This could be a green plastic bucket, a slender mountain dew bottle, pink nylon cord, or a training video for a carpet cleaning machine. Saturated plastic color, transparent fabrics, patterned carpet, and holographic paper are irresistible to me.
Exploration and experimentation are key elements of my art practice. Questions that stir in my mind as I work have been: What kind of liquid is inside of a highlighter? What would happen if I copied and pasted this image a hundred times? How much blue light can you put in a single room? Can I make a drawing with a roll of painters tape?
The final products of these questions may be a video, an interactive website, a book, or an installation that fills an entire room. While the end result may vary, with every work I have common goals. I want the work to be familiar yet mysterious, comfortable yet confusing, physical yet virtual. I want viewers to question their perception of the space, to cherish the banal, to feel playful and inclined to explore. I want people to swoon, gasp, and reflect.
A central theme to my work is color and transforming color. In the first art class I took in college we had a Josef Albers color theory assignment. The whole class had a pack of color paper and our job was to make two different colors look the same and two of the same colors look different. This was all done depending on what color was placed in the background. There was a lot of trial and error in the process figuring out how to push and pull colors to look differently. How will this peach color look against a mauve background than it does with a teal background? Will this cool gray become more warm when placed against a burnt orange or a greenish-yellow?
This assignment made me question the reality of color but it also made the world make a bit more sense. I now knew why on some days my eyes looked more green while on other days they looked more brown. They were affected by the light, the weather, and the clothes I was wearing.
My high school art teacher was the first person to introduce color theory to me. She was explaining complimentary colors to our class and pointed out how the deli at the grocery store puts green material between all the meat. Since green is complimentary to red, the green makes the red of meat more vibrant and therefore appears more juicy and fresh. It was then that I realized color was being used in ways around me to affect my thoughts, feelings and actions.
Play is critical in my work. It is important that I feel like a project is open ended enough that I can chase something down a rabbit hole. A turning point in grad school occurred while putting together an installation that was ultimately titled Ultra Light Bath. I had bought this magnificent octagon shaped mirror and wanted to project a video on it. I was struggling to find the right video while also having technical issues with my equipment. The computer would go to sleep causing the projector to default to a blue screen. I realized that this blue color was so much better than the videos I had been trying to create. The blue transformed the space into something glowing and otherworldly.
The realization with the blue screen taught me to embrace the technical failures, to play, and to be okay with struggling to make sense with a work of art. More of my time as an artist is spent in the unknown than in the known. I have a long list of questions that I am working through and a much smaller list of questions that I have found answers to. And that’s okay. Right now I am working on a pipe project which also has something to do with dreams. I am still figuring out the right way to execute it and the right balance between physical and digital materials.
I live and make art in Yucaipa, California with my husband and our two dogs. I earned an MFA in Art from University of Oregon and a BFA in Studio Art from Brigham Young University.
Things that inspire me:
Campy theme parks and mini golf courses, graphic novels, dollar stores and thrift stores, science museums, garden centers, futuristic science fiction movies, prisms, quilts, and construction zones.
Artists I am interested in:
Pipilotti Rist, Diana Thater, James Turrell, John Baldessari, Polly Apfelbaum, Gerhard Richter, Olafur Eliasson, Yayoi Kusama, Amy Sillman, William Lamson, Jessica Stockholder, Luc Tuymans, Thomas Nozkowski, Helen Frankenthaler, and Sarah Sze.
A place I think everyone should visit:
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Utah.
My desert island food:
Potatoes (they are so versatile!)
