Visit of Mary Harman to Athens.

Τhe end of this year's summer brought to Athens a new friend of the Hellenic Institute of Holography. We had the honour to have Mary Harman, an accomplished painter and holographic artist, as our guest and the pleasure to show her around our working environment along with the classical tourist attractions of the city. (A virtual impression of her art can be formed by visiting her website on this link). 

The painting works of this American artist, who lives and works out of Montreal in Canada, are well known among the artistic circles of N. America. However, what brought her in contact with our Insititute is the original use of display holography in artistic constructions. Already since the early 90s when she was working out of the Art Hologram Studio of Doris Vila in New York, Mary Harman has combined her painting and sculptural art with transparent and futile holograms which occupy and share the same space with selected personal objects in compositions that fuse together the real with the virtual.

Her latest private retrospective exhibition titled 'Object and Illusion' took place in 2009/2010 in Ohio, USA at the Butler Institute of American Art. It was on that occasion that Mary Harman produced an exquisite short video film, in which her personal political views and artistic perspective on the difference between reality and the abstract are presented. Viewing this video is highly recommended as a possible source of some deeper philosophical thoughts on our reality.

"I use the holographic image as a sculptural entity, a volume of light that occupies space. It is fragile, fleeting, transparent, and weightless; it embodies both the physical reality of the original object and its altered, transcendent state. The hologram is, in effect, simultaneously the real and the abstract, both the body and the soul."

'Two Cats with Schrödinger's Cat'

'Pseudoscopy' (1991)

'Body and Soul'

During her visit, the artist had also a pleasant surprise in store for us in her desicion to donate to the Hellenic Institute of Holography some selected historical holograms from the early 90s as well as a couple of unique artistic holographic constructions from her own private collection. Her archetype human-shaped clay-cast figurines inspired by the American Native tribes have been a characteristic repetitive element in Mary Harman's holographic constructions over the years. Therefore, it seems as a natural consequence that the ancient Greek Cycladic and Boiotean figurines have attracted her artistic interest to the extent that we could agree that it mysteriously feels as if her own little sculpted creatures have finally made it 'back home'.

Can we reasonably assume that this visit will serve as a renewed source of artistic inspiration? Unknown yet, though very likely. Nevertheless, it has certainly marked the start of a human friendly relationship to be continued ...

Mary, Betty & Andreas

Mary & Andreas at Z_Studio