The Canvas as Mirror: Getting to Know Ian Harmon

Emerging from inner exploration, artist Ian Harmon creates a body of colorful abstract self-portraits along with a series of pottery for his upcoming May 2021 solo exhibition Looking Glass Self: How the Mind Shapes the Body at The Bakery’s South Downtown gallery. Drawing on this concept in sociology, Ian layers imagery to replicate the fragmented ways in which we are viewed and, in turn, in which we view each other. “My art is all about the process. I did not see the image and paint it. I created this image over a series of days, weeks, and hours of painting.” His canvases and clay face jugs are self-portraits but his works are made by letting the internal channel out rather than reflecting the external self as perceived via an external surface.

Ian Harmon in his GA Tech off campus unit which also acts as his studio.

Ian and I met at his succinct 1-bedroom GA Tech off-campus student housing unit. There are no dorm room tapestries but rather artworks by [artists he admires] and small pieces made by friends. As an industrial design student, he is inherently interested in how humans interact with the environments around them. He shows off his closet, which is constructed from heavily insulated styrofoam packing from meal kits, like a DIY IKEA storage system. His career path echoes in his personal art practice as viewer and self, maker and object exist in an ongoing conversation in his work. Yet there is also a deep care that is evident in the way Ian speaks about all things.

Wort, 2020

“Pottery, more than other art that I create, has a life of its own. It says I am not going to be controlled in this way, I am going to shape myself, you can’t really have any preconceived notions of what I can be. I see that as a very similar thing to the plants that I take care of… the minute you try to get a plant to do exactly what you want is the minute that plant dies.”

This experience of working with nature rather than against it shapes his approach to art-making. We chat about his high school art career - he was the president of his high school’s art club responsible for producing quarterly/yearly shows - and his transition into college. In his high school AP program, he created both a 2-D and 3-D portfolio but was unable to master throwing on the wheel until he revisited pottery with his mom while quarantining back at home at the beginning of 2020. He remarks on his high school peers when he acted as juror.

After high school, Ian says he left everything literal in the dust. He now approaches the canvas with a free-flowing hand, letting doodling lead in and out of a figurative form abstracted with bright swatches of bold color and composed of small patterns. Painting is a mindfulness practice for Ian. “If you were to read my mind while I was working, it would just be pleasant melodies,” he says. His artistic dedication also acts as a constant check-in for himself, asking oneself “are you being nice to yourself?” He wants his work to act as a reminder for others to check in with themselves too.

Ian with his Art

“It’s really important to understand that there are hundreds of ways this painting could have gone. A lot of it depended on my mood, a lot of it depended on my brushes, on the weather. By having mirrors, you get to see fragments of the artwork before you arrive at it.”

Yet like many of us, he struggles to find the distinction between the maker and object, that one is not a direct reflection on the other. There is jarring anguish and subtle joy in Ian’s work, both encased in confident determination. He celebrates the ambiguity in the work as well as the process of being an artist as much as the art product produced. He understands that creating is as much a mental challenge as a physical one; that your hand can’t draw what your mind won’t allow one to see. He has had struggles and breakthroughs in his art-making but the key here is that he hasn’t given up. Nor does he let it dictate his entire existence. 

Meaning is constructed after the process of painting, the fragmentation and abstract images and ideas of the self, “there is no one right way to be viewed, to be ourselves. We have egos, we have shadows, we are very complex and it’s very hard to boil down your qualities into right-wrong, good-bad.” Through the layering of his process/canvases, he is able to break down the boundaries of preconceived notions of a world held in black and white. “I call it the looking-glass neurosis,” which comes from a concept in sociology in which you see yourself in the eyes of other people which in turn shapes your behavior, coined by Charles Horton Cooley in 1902.

Some of Ian’s Sketchbooks

“Even if something isn’t technically ‘good’, we have to ask if it still deserves a place— I think everyone’s art should be seen, regardless of its quality. Being in that position really allowed me to grow from a mindset of art to be seen or to be judged, to something very personal. There were students that put more heart and soul into pieces that turned out a lot worse than students who just threw something on paper and it was great. I really admired the students who really put their heart into it regardless of the outcome.”

We look forward to co-producing Ian’s first solo show. Ian stresses the collaborative nature of creating, that’s it’s not an individualistic thing despite his focus on the self. “The life of an artist, by virtue of art being seen, has to be a collaborative one. I rely on and value my friendships in this process.” As a platform committed to process, we enjoy working with artists who are aligned in this motivation.