The Guilford Courier

February 7, 2002 / Page C-3

         By Amy J. Barry                   Shore Living Editor        

  “One man’s junk is another    man’s treasure” certainly holds        true for Stony Creek artist Harvee Riggs. Anything from a Chia Pet    head (remember those?) to grand-   ma’s rhinestone earring may find   it’s way into one of Harvee’s boxes  taking on a hole new meaning - or  meanings in the name of art                  Harvee collects his items by haunting junk shops, tag sales, and flea markets and even scouring the beach. His friends and neighbors donate doodads and thingamajigs.        He doesn't plan out his constructions per se, although hedoes often arrange things by color, shape, size, and material.          "They just sort of grow by juxtaposing the objects until if feels right," Harvee explains. "I'll keep adding more things until I achieve satisfactory imagery. It's sort of an adventure. When I'm collecting them, I don't know what the objects will become or what is even going to work."                               Last September, several of Harvee's boxes were in the Guilford Art League Show. This past fall he won a prizefrom the Springfield, Massachusetts, Art

commit to painting."                                   Harvee continued trying various media, but he says nothing held his interest for long. He headed into a career in the printing industry, which introduced him to computers, and he became a Photoshop special effects graphic artist and color expert. But he says it didn't fulfill his artistic craving.                                           "It wasn't like creating art with my hands. A computer lacks the tactile enjoyment I get from using real world materials. There is something kind of cold, distant, and detached about computers. It's not like holding something 3-D in your hands."                  For close to nine years, Harvee directed, produced, and edited a weekly acoustic music show to quench his artistic thirst, "Euphonious Mode," which he says gave him instant visual gratification and allowed him to work with a group of people--"more fun than the solitary working style of a painter."                       He's also created the graphics for a number of CD covers.                               Always a collector, Harvee had held onto many of his childhood treasures and wherever he's lived, always has a five-gallon bucket in his home to throw things into--because you just never know.                                                                                                               See SPOTLIGHT page C-4

   Harvee began experimenting with boxes in the 1990s. But after taking a class with the boxist artist Arthur Guagliumi last June at the Guilford Handcraft Center, he says, "it just clicked with me."                                                                                                                   Up until then he'd made five boxes in five years. Since then he's made 14 more.                                                                                                "I just love this medium," he says. "I've exploded with it."              Unlike some boxist artists whose work all has a similar theme or trademark style to it, Harvee's work is extremely varied and always surprising. He creates several types of boxes: shadow boxes, memory boxes, and story boxes.                                                      Like paintings, some are more abstract, some more literal. Many reflect an offbeat sense of humor. Others, particularly one filled with old dirty doll heads and limbs, exudes a darker sense of death and foreboding (at least for this viewer).                                       "They're all very different," he says. "Once I've used certain materials, there is no going back. I don't get stuck on a theme. It makes me use my imagination.                                                                   Harvee's largest piece is a memory box of his own personal memories organized into a pleasing montage. It includes such    

items as 37, old cigarette lighters.                                                               "I used to be a smoker," he says.                                                              Another memory box containing brass buttons and sewing machine parts pays tribute to his grandfather, a NYC sewing machine operator in the 1930s. In a rather elaborate construction, Harvee built a telescope out of brass lamp parts and has an old religious statue peering into it.                                                                      There is even a shriveled up Halloween pumpkin at the center of one box that Harvee carved last winter, which sort of freeze-dried into a wonderfully ghoulish little face. "It's wearing my hair," he points out. Even after after cutting off his ponytail, he found a use for it.                                                                                                                    Harvee is reticent to talk about the deeper meaning in his work."I don't want to force people to see what I meant," he says. "Even titles can be too specific and lead people into a particular meaning. I like the viewer to extract something of their own from my work."

     To view Harvee's boxes, visit his new website:                                   www.harveeriggs.com

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