Claudia Hart’s contemporary digital designs juxtapose the futuristic and the classical, combining 3D animation software with canonical images like the female nude or classic still life. Many of her works integrate sensual female bodies with the overly-determined Cartesian world of digital design with the intention of interjecting emotional subjectivity. Ophelia, 2008, addresses the theme of death contrasted by Hart’s vision of a futuristic universe where technology and hyper real bodies escape decay. The exposed body of a naked woman drifts at the bottom of the ocean, the latter littered with refuse and plastic bags. The setting and reference to Hamlet’s Ophelia - the feminist figure embodying the Electra complex of a woman gone mad and committing suicide for love of a man who killed her father - raise two themes of loss and disintegration: the losing of youth and love; and the loss of a harmonious coexistence with the natural world.

Hart - artist, critic and curator - lives and works in Chicago, where she is Associate Professor in the department of Film Video, New Media and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.