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Local Artist Writes Love Letter to His Wife in the Form of a Cloud

By Janet Upadhye | July 20, 2012 3:55pm

FORT GREENE — A cloud breaks through the wall of Harvey Theater in Fort Greene. Even from blocks away, the surreal sight stops passersby in their tracks. As part of BAM’s public art project, Ed Purver’s Always Season provides a disruption in the uniformity of Brooklyn’s red brick buildings.

Purver is one of the four artists chosen by curators for BAMart, a project of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, out of a pool of over 100 proposals to create public art in the neighborhood. All four live in Brooklyn. 

Purver’s display is about possibility, transformation, and what takes place underneath the surface.

“Behind every façade, no matter how impenetrable it may appear, there may be an unexpected moment of beauty, of simplicity or poetry,” he said. “I am thinking both in terms of the facades of buildings and also of the façades of people.”

The print is made up of what Purver calls a “digital composition of multiple different photographs.” Purver said that he spent a day punching holes on rolls of paper to create the break seen in the print image.

He was inspired to create this particular piece of art by the building itself. Passing by the Harvey Theater in bike or foot, Purver would imagine what kind of fantastical goings on were happening behind its wall. And when he first looked at the building it was framed by blue sky and white clouds. Now, the clouds are on the building itself.

But as with many art works, his inspiration was also personal.

“But it is also kind of a love letter to my wife, Monica, who has been photographing clouds for years, since before we met,” he said. “They have come to represent the constant presence of something beautiful that always already exists, around the edges of our lives.”