P·P·O·W is pleased to present Sick Metal, Harry Gould Harvey IV’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Born and raised in the post-industrial city of Fall River, MA, and Narragansett Bay, where he resides to this day, Harvey draws inspiration from the ecological fabric of his native South Coast Region to deconstruct the building blocks of empire and illuminate the weight of anonymous labor. Foraging materials from downed or cut trees, destroyed Gilded Age mansions, dilapidated factories, gutted Gothic churches, and his subconscious, Harvey creates mystical and diagrammatic drawings housed inside hand-built wood frames akin to reliquaries and large-scale sculptural installations which evoke lost histories of marginalized artisanship and backbreaking toil in the name of American industry and luxury.

Mimicking geometric combinations he observed in nature, the works in Sick Metal are held in symmetrical balance as if through a magnetic pull. In Magneto Cloud Buster Broken Tub Thumper, 2023, Harvey fashions a red wax lion after the cement versions which stand as guardians over driveways and porches throughout the Northeast. Sitting atop a stack of vintage Japanese high-fidelity speakers originally brought to the US by military veterans, the lion features an antenna stretching upward from its back as if attempting to spark. Returning to the punk, noise and metal music scenes of his youth, Harvey composes an ambient score blending music and voice recordings, bird songs, and street sounds which emanate from the speakers only when activated by pressing a doorbell next to the sculpture. In another room, large tin factory fire doors, suspended in space by the grip of white bronze Osprey claws, spiral around twin monitors on lead clad pedestals which play compilations of video footage archiving a temporal index of the artist’s labor and daily life. In one video the artist finds a ladder on the side of the road. The same ladder is physically displayed in the gallery, replete with bronze and wax adornment, and is repeated in drawings such as Garden, 2023, and The Phantasmagoric Ladder ( Status Qou ), 2023. In this work, Harvey canonizes a late 19th century laborer who died on the ladder he carries in the image while connecting the electrical structure of Fall River to the grid. The infrastructure laid by Saint Kennedy is still in use to this day. Collapsing the spiritual and the political, the industrial and the biological, Sick Metal aims to attune us to the afflictions that all humans share and provide frameworks for healing, understanding, and transformation.