Open Home Hamper

When housing agents lead willing punters into an open home they want to show them a shop-window-abbreviated version of a paradisiacal home sweet home. The potential homebuyer never gets to try it on for size to spend a day playing around to see if he or she really does fit the shoe neatly after all.

Open Home Hamper Mark Harvey is a potential purchaser, conducting a nesting trail in the garage of a suburban property which is for sale. Performing with video camera strapped to this head, the viewer receives a first-hand view of his activities in the space. Employing free-associative play in this consumerist quest for the comforts of a happy home, Harvey draws on a fantasyland of childhood TV imaginings and discovery, a lucky dip of family values, action heroes, and happy endings - along with allusions to home invasion and a nod to dinner table habits.

The accumulation of objects as a result of his work in the space can be seen to form a residue or a rubbish heap of dead actions, or, conversely, a nest and refuge.

Open Home Hamper will also be subject to a TV-trained Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome attention span, where in a never-ending pattern once I become board with a scenario I will leave it and move on to something else...'In the name of the father' this hamper of home-renovation is is set in the rear end of the suburban dream, which is not only the garage but the bastion of the spanner and all phallicentric dreams; a hamper fantasy playground.

Reviews, Essays & Articles
Social Rites Study
The Press, May 30, 2002, p 32
Pauli, Dorothee 
Mark Harvey, Deej Fabyc, Elvis Richardson.

HARDSELL - BECAUSE YOU WANT IT!
MARK HARVEY - Artist Q&A
The Physics Room Annual, 2002