++++ sculpture | installation | walldrawing | animation | story boards | actor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Harms
In the past six years, I went from making large-scale outdoor sculpture to acting and animating. There is this horizontal line in every cartoon. That ‘horizon’ is the holdover from my large drawings and public sculpture. Here it becomes a desk, or a fence, or a dashboard. Finding a million ways to use that line is totally ridiculous, but I love it. The characters all strive for something more grand than they have been dealt in life, without knowing what that should be; they try on different postures, different costumes, they seek fulfillment by dating, or making friends.
Artist’s Bio
jeffharms.wordpress.com/resume/
I was born in a small suburb of Chicago and studied drawing and painting with Phillip Govedare and Eugene Pizzuto at University of Washington in a mostly abstract expressionist style. 2D turned to 3D over a couple years after school before I started studying sculpture in earnest with Tom Bills, Graham Campbell and Tory Fair at Brandeis University. After Brandeis, 3D turned to performance art during my master’s study at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There I studied with Goat Island’s Lin Hixson and Mathew Goulish. Over ten years in Chicago I studied acting at The Actor’s Studio and collaborated extensively with fellow SAIC alum, the playwright, Brian Torrey Scott. Together we made dozens of plays and films experimenting with character, improvisation and dialogue. Acting spilled over into writing songs and I eventually formed a band, The Jeff Harms Singers. I did a couple tours of the country playing shows and once later as a member of the great band The Cairo Gang.
Working as a teaching artist in Chicago Public Schools for ten years as a freelancer and as part of Music National Service, I felt like my head had hit a financial ceiling. I made a last-ditch effort applying to several residencies and commissions and found myself a finalist for the Kohler Arts Center Residency. I told myself if I got the residency I would devote my career to sculpture. I told myself if I didn’t, I would move to LA and reinvent myself… I did not get it. So I moved to LA at 42 to be closer to old friends, but having no plan.
Acting and art department were the only ‘jobs’ I was qualified for, so for the past six years I have pursued both. In the art sphere I find myself most useful as a prop builder. And in the acting world, I have had the good fortune of being directed by Mark Duplass, Hiro Murai, Zack Snyder. I got to play Hunter S. Thompson in the PBS documentary The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo and most recently, I played Ben Hecht in David Fincher’s Mank alongside Gary Oldman, Tom Pelphrey and Joseph Cross.
(2020): I currently am quarantined in a house built in 1880 in Silverlake with three other actors and musicians. I do everything with my mac laptop, large midi keyboard and 22″ cintiq tablet.
UPDATE (Hollywood acting):
Jeff Harms is known for Mank (2020), Monsters (2022) and The Influencers (2019).