In the context of the post-digital, Claudia Hart imports the compositional structures of the red paintings by Henri Matisse to propose a paradigm shift in painting practice, creating animations at a real-painting scale. Like Matisse, Hart has constructed animated images-within-images, as architectures open onto windows and doors that in turn open onto simulated landscapes and rooms bestowed with animated paintings, carpets and wallpapers. Works in this series present digital, pictorial clockworks, in which wheels turn at different rates and temporal schemes to mesmerize viewers, ushering them into a state of contemplation. Big Red portrays environments in which time is fluid and elastic, in constant flux and multi-directional, where all is in motion and mutable though nothing is actually happening. This is a different notion of time, an unstable present, in which viewers may experience through the possibility of simulation-technologies that use scientific data to model natural forces, the crystallization of past, future and present into a perpetual now.

This work is intended to be projected onto a stretched screen or directly onto a wall at 90 x 63 inches. With purchase, the buyer will receive their selection of Claudia's Hart's Matissesque or Joyful Noise Augmented Reality wallpaper from bitforms gallery (production costs not included). The ideal presentation includes a projection on stretched screen over the artist's wallpaper, as pictured in the artwork image.

Claudia Hart (b. 1955) emerged as part of a generation of ‘90s intermedia artists examining issues of identity and representation. Since the late ‘90s when she began working with 3D animation, Hart embraced these same concepts, but now focusing on the impact of computing and simulation technologies. She was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, and later, as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR and objects produced by computer-driven production machines. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a professor, she developed a pedagogic program based on her practice – Experimental 3D – the first dedicated solely to teaching simulation technologies in an art-school context.

Hart’s works are widely exhibited and collected by galleries and museums, including the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has been shown at the New Museum, produced at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, where she was an honorary fellow in 2013-14, at Pioneer Works, New York, where she was a technology resident in 2018 and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, University of California, Berkeley where she is currently a Fellow. She is represented by bitforms gallery.