Claudia Hart’s Rhythms of Deferral and Renewal
Installation view of Claudia Hart, Illuminations, bitforms gallery, 2025. Photo: Yi Hsuan Lai.
In a cultural moment teetering between spectacle, speed, and collapse, Claudia Hart’s solo exhibition Illuminations stages a quiet revolution. It refuses the boastful clarity demanded by today’s attention economies: there is nothing flashy, fast-moving, or easily marketable about the works on view. Instead, Hart takes a thoroughly humanist approach, proposing an alternate model of time and sensation that is slow, cyclical, and porous, while disrupting the illusion of flatness, especially in the digital realm. Hart invites us to contemplate the rhythms of repetition, recursion, and the steady unmooring of certainty.
In Illuminations, currently on view at bitforms gallery, the New York-based artist ambitiously presents a combination of new works and revisited and reconfigured elements from her own artistic past, folding earlier motifs into new, layered structures that feel at once familiar and newly enigmatic. Ten short, hypnotic 3D animations are embedded within paintings encased in handcrafted frames. Together, they both reflect a hybrid process in line with Hart’s media agnosticism and create a mise en abyme where each layer gestures toward another. On initial approach, the works exude a seductive charm, inviting passive admiration, but on closer inspection, the intricate choreography between subtle animation, painting, and frame becomes clear. The animations act as portals to another world in a strategic bastardization of the surface: the paintings are extrapolations from the animations themselves, abstracting and refracting their content through pigmented resin. This strategy of self-sampling creates an uncanny sense of recursion. The works operate not merely in the looped moving image, the painting, nor in the floating frame, but in the sustained slippage between them.
Installation view of Claudia Hart, Illuminations, bitforms gallery, 2025. Photo: Yi Hsuan Lai.
Hart’s corpus is reconfigured here as a body already fractured by time and technology: previous works reappear transformed, their meaning blurred in a continuum of recoded pasts. In The Memory Theaters of Claudia Hart (2023–24), new autobiographical monologues replace the old. Fallen Angel: Bertile (Illumination) (2024–2025), Fallen Angels: Phylophia (Illumination) (2024–25), and the AI-generated Proxy Angels (2025) further this experiment with a kind of mutation and return. The Fallen Angels works use motion capture recordings of the artist to produce her animated alter ego transformed into fictional beings with unique gifts. Proxy Angels is an additionally abstracted form of self-portraiture made with detailed descriptions of the artist’s life, both lived and imagined, fed into text-to-video AI software. The back room of the gallery offers a quiet origin point for Hart’s creative evolution, presenting selections from her children’s book, A Child’s Macchiavelli, a tongue-in-cheek primer on power which began as paintings. Here, there are hints of Hart’s visual vocabulary transforming into the uncanny verisimilitudes of 3D animation she eventually adopted into her practice.
Installation view of Claudia Hart, Illuminations, bitforms gallery, 2025. Photo: Yi Hsuan Lai.
On a separate wall, The Days (Seven Healing Flowers for Seven Days) (2024), made in collaboration with Andrew Blanton, is a work that orchestrates a quietly monumental gesture of translating a meditative temporality into digital form. Made with custom software, the work generates evolving floral patterns modeled on species of healing flowers, which unfold in a non-repeating choreography of mutation and return. Beginning each cycle at noon with formal, wallpaper-like precision, the flowers bloom, dissolve, and recombine across 24 hours, tracing an organic abstraction that feels at once algorithmic and deeply embodied. Each species of medicinal flower reappears cyclically, yet no two iterations are ever the same. Instead, growth, decay, and regeneration weave together in a slow, entrancing rhythm that echoes biological processes while remaining unmistakably artificial.
We live in a world saturated by simulacra, yet Hart's work reminds us that within even the most artificial rhythms, there still stirs the pulse of sensation, longing, as well as critique. As we find ourselves caught in the accelerating vortex of technological development, Hart’s gently shifting animations move with a near-invisible flux that destabilizes visual certainty, deferring meaning into hypnotic rhythms. They mirror the uneasy stirrings of mind and body in a world saturated by digital repetition and gross accelerationism. They suggest ours is a world in which perception itself is under constant siege by streams of data, commodified affect, and spectral information. They provoke a subtle mental dysmorphia, a destabilization of the self's coherence within an ever-replicating matrix of images and temporalities. In this terrain, to be human is to negotiate a fragile existence within systems too complex to comprehend or control. Against this backdrop, Illuminations does not naively mourn these lost promises, nor does it celebrate the vertigo of collapse. Instead, it lingers within the instability these conditions create, insisting that even within the churn of artifice, a different kind of vitality might still be possible. If we are to survive, we will continue as trembling, sensing, worldbuilding creatures, as The Green Wall (Illumination) (2023/2025), in particular, suggests.
Installation view of Claudia Hart, Illuminations, bitforms gallery, 2025. Photo: Yi Hsuan Lai.
In a moment characterized by algorithmic governance and a rush toward the future, Hart’s aesthetic feels both quietly urgent and timeless. The construction of worlds-within-worlds—with systems folded into themselves, never entirely stable and never wholly revealed—gathers as an irrational methodology for being in the world. Here, the endless delay and displacement of Derrida’s différance, where meaning arises through distinction, is made material. [1] We are thus invited into a kind of trance, a dwelling within uncertainty. What is illuminated, then, is not truth but its absence. It is not clarity but the possibility of something else: a solidarity born of difference but also of shared disorientation. And yet, against the weight of such hypothetical melancholy, Hart’s work hums with an understated vitality and a glimmer of hope.
Hart’s method stages a destabilization of power and origin. Every surface is both a source and a residue, offering a new illumination and a haunted echo of previous worlds. The works thus function as reliquaries of the virtual, or as mausoleums for meaning that both mourn and celebrate the instability of signification and the resurfacing of the past. History does not progress in Illuminations. It trembles, collapses, and recombines. This collapse of form and content, depth and surface, evokes the recursive structures of continental thought, even as it refuses theoretical overdetermination. Hart’s works are less arguments than invitations to inhabit the uneasy space where sensation becomes thought and where perception slips into hallucination. The result is a dense, self-aware system where meaning multiplies without anchoring. Rather than present a closed narrative, the work unfolds as a musing on perception, memory, and artifice itself.
Installation view of Claudia Hart, Illuminations, bitforms gallery, 2025. Photo: Yi Hsuan Lai.
Claudia Hart: Illuminations is on view at bitforms gallery from April 26 through June 7, 2025.
[1] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
Edited by Jubilee Park
