Auriea Harvey works at the intersection of the digital and the physical, creating 3D worlds and Augmented Reality (AR) projects alongside her traditional sculptural practice. For Aorist launch, Harvey presents Minoriea, a mythological creature born from Harvey’s own visual vernacular. Minoreia connects classical figures with the eternity of the future via the blockchain and AR. The corresponding NFT will be released on Aorist. 

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Auriea’s work often references ancient mythologies. Rendering iconography into form, she utilizes new methods that point to the future of our ability to create and to retell our stories. Harvey gives us Minoriea, an elusive and powerful character—an animated futuristic goddess. Half-woman, half-bull, this beautiful beast stands as a symbol of the potential of the human body—the very possibilities we might be or might become. The viewer might find her both comical and menacing, seductive and brooding, speaking of humanity in all its animality and of what the future of technology may hold. The Minotauress reminds us not only of our connection to our own bestial nature, but also points to the very potential for our bodies to transition, to change, and to become—to inhabit a boundless and unrestrained hybridity. We find AR versions of Minoriea dispersed throughout the Faena District in Art Week Miami 2021—like the trickster characters of many cosmologies, Harvey opens the crossroads between the digital and the physical, between the future and the past, between this world and the next. 

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AURIEA HARVEY 

Aureira Harvey (b. 1971, United States) currently resides in Rome and works as a video game designer and innovative digital artist. Her art inhabits a hybrid space of ‘mixed reality’. Auriea coalesces physical and digital processes to create pieces of art that amalgamate the tangible and intangible realms, often creating digital sculptures with a physical counterpart. She describes the way in which her artwork ‘metamorphoses between the digital scans and their materiality’. Auriea’s work is heavily influenced by Hellenistic and Baroque art both aesthetically and philosophically; she re-works and retells mythological narratives, placing them in a contemporary context. Harvey’s work has been internationally revered and can be found in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Centre, Lot 555 Collection and the National Bank of Belgium. Her Virtual Reality pieces and video games have been exhibited in museums and galleries such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The New Museum in New York and the Tinguely Museum in Basel. Moreover, Harvey was the recipient of the Creative Capital Grant for Digital Media in 2006, as well as the winner of the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award in 2011. 

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