Twilight · Claudia Hart

bitforms gallery presents its first New York solo exhibition with artist Claudia Hart. The exhibition features sculpture and animated video installations using Rococo painting language and film noir tenebrism to develop a cyber-feminist narrative within a 3-D gaming world. Hart treats virtual avatars as figures cycling through "decay and transformation," embracing the Nietzschean concept that death and decadence constitute growth's intrinsic components. "The Seasons" (2009) depicts a white room with a slowly evolving sculptural figure—a seated woman decomposing while surrounded by blooming and fading roses on a rotating pedestal. The animation employs counterpoint movements creating barely perceptible visual effects where "time seems to stand still, as in life." Hart's work references visionary architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Étienne-Louis Boullée, and Jean-Jacques Leque, combining animated techniques with "sublime landscape gardens" containing expressive female bodies. Her pieces exist "in the psychological realm of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and contemporary procedural crime dramas." "The Swing" (2006) features a Baroque-inspired nude avatar named Machina on a suspended swing in super Mannerist slow time, with surrounding woods operating at different temporal rates. The "Mortification" series juxtaposes realistic computer models with irregular deformations, employing ABS plastic to propose "a digital Baroque." "Ophelia" (2008) presents a naked woman adrift among ocean refuse—a contemporary meditation on environmental loss.