Harley Ives is a Sydney-based artist working predominantly with the moving image. His seamless video loops prioritise the visual qualities of an image over conventional narrative, inviting the viewer to engage with them as moving paintings or visual scores.
At the heart of Ives’s practice is a process of deliberate analogue degradation process. A finished digital composition is committed to VHS tape, then dubbed from one tape to the next across multiple generations, before being returned to digital form. What accumulates in transit — the smears, streaks, distortions, and glitches — becomes the material he works with: digital artefacts treated with the same attention and intention as a painter’s mark. In doing so, Ives elevates the incidental byproducts of an obsolete medium into the stuff of refined aesthetic experience.
Ives graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from the University of Western Sydney in 2002 and completed a PhD at Sydney College of the Arts in 2018. He co-directed artist-run initiative Firstdraft Gallery and has curated numerous video art projects across Sydney. He currently teaches at the National Art School, Sydney. Ives has exhibited at Roslyn Oxley9, Campbelltown Arts Centre, the National Art School, and Artspace, and is a three-time finalist for the Churchie National Emerging Art Award, a finalist for the Still: National Still Life Award, and a recipient of the prestigious Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship.
His work is held in the Artbank collection, the City of Sydney Collection, and private collections across Australia.
