Make Believe: video work by Desiree Holman opens tomorrow!

Thursday, March 12

3 p.m. Artist Conversation
McLaren 251

4 p.m. Reception
Thacher Gallery

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Desirée Holman is an Oakland-based visual artist. As with many of her works, the three video installations in "Make Believe" explore the tension between reality and fantasy. An interdisciplinary artist, Holman fabricates costumes and masks to be worn by herself and actors in portrayals of role-playing scenarios. Her use of primitive animation techniques and handcrafted costumes create a tension between passive and active modes of reception, allowing viewers a critical distance even as they find themselves pulled into the fantasies. These videos are the result of long-term research and a many-layered process often involving drawing, photography, sculpture, and writing.

Holman is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts as well as a recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA award. In 2007, she received the Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Hessel Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Milan’s BnD, Toronto’s YYZ, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Lisa Boyle Gallery in Chicago. She is represented by the Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. In 1999, directly after completing her BFA in sculpture at CCA, Holman attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and graduated with her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2002.

Artist Statement

Engaging in make-believe provides practice in roles one might someday assume in real life. It helps one to understand and sympathize with others. It enables one to come to grips with one’s own feelings. It broadens one’s perspectives.

—Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts

All the works in "Make Believe" involve role-playing games that utilize handcrafted figurative sculptures as props. The sculptures are effigies, and include life-size dolls, wearable full-body forms and masks. I use fantasy play with these effigies as a means of discovery. The process of playing and animating the figurative forms that I create allows for the probing and expression of the fundamental (but normally taken for granted) dynamics of human relationships and emotions.

In "Art as Therapy" (2002), I posed as a family therapist who is giving therapy to a family of life-size dolls. The aim is for the family members to better understand and accept their individual responsibility in the emotional life of the family unit. My initial “consultation” with the family begins with their appearance on a popular television talk show. From this television program, I created life-size dolls representing each family member, which I then animated in the video. In effect, I am both the therapist and the clients. The video provides a window into the transformation we experience as we struggle to change relationships, alleviate symptoms, and improve the emotional functioning of the family system.

Again, in "I would do almost anything that you asked me to do..." (2005), I act as multiple characters with the use of figurative sculptures. In this piece, however, I actually inhabit the effigies and animate them from within the forms. I was inspired by a type of extreme cross-dressing in which (usually) a man puts on a full-body latex suit of a woman’s body and face. From four adult male models, I created four flesh-like, stretchy suits that I could literally step into and wear. Robed in these skins, I enacted the roles of four distinct male characters in relationship to myself, engaging in a romantic, yet failed, attempts to waltz with the various male suitors.

Similarly, "Troglodyte" (2005) features inhabitable sculptural forms. In this work, however, the characters are played by multiple performers including myself. The term "troglodyte" describes a simpleton or brute who is emotionally reactive and potentially dangerous; s/he is without acute powers of reasoning. For this piece, I sculpted multiple life-size, wearable, latex, hair and fabric, chimpanzee-like forms. Whether in the spotlight of academic investigations or popular culture, the chimpanzee has often been the focus for human projection. By inhabiting the sculptural forms and pretending to be a chimpanzee, the work investigates human emotion and behavior.

These games always revolve around relationships and reciprocity (or lack there of). I wonder what games of make-believe, like the ones I create in my work or the ones created in multi-user online games or elsewhere, can tell us about our behaviors in the "real" world.

Desirée Holman, 2009

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Desiree Holman in the Press:

• San Francisco Bay Guardian
  
• 7 x 7 Magazine
  

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The gallery is grateful to Steve Rhyne, Director of Technology for the Art + Architecture Department, for his technical expertise in presenting this work.

Susanne M. Winterling - updates and shows!

UNTITLED (FORMATION: THE CIRCLE,THE LINE)

Super 16mm, 5min 23, 2009

DP: Tobias Peper, Music: Matteah Baim,

special thanks to Athea, Luca, Lina, Christina Steiner, Simonetta Rocchetti

Eastman Kodak

will be presented for the first time on Sat 28 2009

at THE FRONT ROOM, Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis

http://www.contemporarystl.org/current.php

other things going on:

till beg of March Alliance, Sisterhood and the Rope at Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo

till beg og March BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna

till March 21 Don't expect anything, Francesca Minini, Milano

http://www.francescaminini.it/

till April Zendai Museum Shanghai

http://www.zendaiart.com/En/Default.aspx

http://www.intrude366.com/en-US/intrude366/Project.aspx?articleid=979

Susanne M. Winterling - updates and shows!

UNTITLED (FORMATION: THE CIRCLE,THE LINE)

Super 16mm, 5min 23, 2009

DP: Tobias Peper, Music: Matteah Baim,

special thanks to Athea, Luca, Lina, Christina Steiner, Simonetta Rocchetti

Eastman Kodak

will be presented for the first time on Sat 28 2009

at THE FRONT ROOM, Contemporary Art Museum St.Louis

http://www.contemporarystl.org/current.php

other things going on:

till beg of March Alliance, Sisterhood and the Rope at Hiromi Yoshii, Tokyo

till beg og March BAWAG Contemporary, Vienna

till March 21 Don't expect anything, Francesca Minini, Milano

http://www.francescaminini.it/

till April Zendai Museum Shanghai

http://www.zendaiart.com/En/Default.aspx

http://www.intrude366.com/en-US/intrude366/Project.aspx?articleid=979

Desiree Holman - SFBG talks about Holman in SECA and what is to come!

She's a magic woman

SECA: Try to understand — the play is the thing in Desirée Holman's masked wonderlands

By Matt Sussman

SECA ART AWARDS

There is a lot of play going on in the work of Desirée Holman. As evinced by the handmade masks, props, and costumes that populate her multimedia pieces — a family therapy workshop comprised of dolls in 2002's Art as Therapy; a clan of Bigfoot-like sapiens in 2005's Troglodyte; and most recently, the estranged visages of television's Huxtable and Conner families in The Magic Window — an anarchic "let's raid the dress-up box" impulse is often her guiding force. Family sitcoms, pop cultural junk food, and mediated existence in a thoroughly televised culture are her source materials.

From Cindy Sherman's faux film stills and prosthetic body part augmentations to Paul McCarthy's return-of-the-repressed performances using all manner of foodstuffs and costume shop detritus, the act of playing dress-up has its art-historical precedents. While Holman's work superficially brings Sherman and McCarthy to mind (the influence of the former is certainly apparent in 2006's Bucolic Life, where she plays mother and wife to a mannequin family within a series of supposedly candid snapshots), her art is not as routinely fixated on confronting the viewer with the grotesque and abject.

"I can see why people would find my work creepy, but I don't see it that way," laughs Holman over the phone. Judging from the opening night crowd's response to The Magic Window — which takes pride of place at the SECA Art Award show — the most common response to Holman's work seems to be nervous laughter. But when Roseanne Conner resembles Leatherface, it's not hard to see why.

However palpable, unease is just a surface response to Holman's rough-hewn masks and bodysuits. As fellow Guardian critic Glen Helfand noted in an Artforum review of Troglodyte, the empty costumes of the piece's hirsute, apelike creatures "still channel our evolutionary connection to them" — a connection underscored by videos and photographs of the costumed creatures smoking cigarettes and dancing. No matter how funny or scary we find the ape family, we remain inescapably tied to them. Holman's art teases out these strange channels and treats them as invitations to play along.

This invitation to connect beyond familiar comfort zones — even if, as viewers, we are frequently stuck, costumeless, on the outside looking in — is what animates The Magic Window, a project originally conceived for and shown at SF's Silverman Gallery, which is showing work by Holman this April. Comprised of a three-channel video on one wall and colored pencil drawings on the wall opposite, The Magic Window takes its title from a 1939 ad campaign used to sell early, primitive TV sets to American consumers. But the name could just as easily be applied to the sculptural masks worn by Holman and her cast.

The video starts off with parallel narratives loosely modeled after incidents from Roseanne and The Cosby Show, and ends with both families leaving their respective screens to visit each other's homes/sets. For a finale, the two clans come together for a center-screen psychedelic dance-off set in a purely virtual space where everyone glows with a green-screen aura. (This aura effect is rendered beautifully through tensile wisps in Holman's delicate drawings). In other hands, the Huxtables and Conners would be mined for parodic laughs or used for nastier ends (see McCarthy's and Mike Kelley's assault on family life in their 1992 video Heidi), but Holman has a deep affection for her source material. "I personally like both television shows, which were really progressive for their time," she says. "And I really wanted to look at the similarities between the two families."

Holman's collaborative fantasy union — in which one of television's most popular, white, middle-class families gets down with its first-ever affluent, upper-middle class African American kin — could not resonate more with our country's current political moment. The Huxtables are now, in a sense, the First Family, and the notion of a "post-racial America" has never had greater currency or been as thoroughly debated. To wit, Holman recently revealed in an interview with the blog Future Shipwreck that she created the masks for The Magic Window by attempting to combine the facial characteristics of her cast members with those of the actors who portrayed the characters on television.

In light of the recent election and current events, Holman has, understandably, been thinking a lot about The Magic Window. "On the one hand, [it presents] a critique of reenacting something that is already a fiction," she says, when asked about the piece. Then, as if channeling the zeitgeist on cue, she continues, "But on the other hand — and more powerful for me — are the acts of hope that these families act out in the video."

SECA ART AWARD EXHIBITION: TAUBA AUERBACH, DESIRÉE HOLMAN, JORDAN KANTOR, AND TREVOR PAGLEN

Through May 10; $12.50 adults, $8 seniors, $7 students (free for 12 and under)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

151 Third St., SF

(415) 357-4000

www.sfmoma.org

Riley John Donnell and Job Piston - upcoming shows - flyers!

Job Piston's work in Paper Exhibition

Job Piston: Review for "Paper Exhibition"

Paper Exhibition

Artists Space, New York, USA

Judith Braun, The Line Between Fiction and Reality (2009)

Entering ‘Paper Exhibition’ at Artists Space is like taking a leap through a distorted looking glass - or better through the hole in one of Job Piston’s cocktail napkins Untitled (Etiquette) (2009), included here.

The maze-like collection of lost, found and made-up fragments and artifacts, all of which respond to cryptic narratives, is mesmerizing - but it can also be confusing. Lucky, then, that Judith Braun’s drawing The Line Between Fiction and Reality (2009) functions as a guide to the exhibition. Taking on the longest wall of the central space, Braun’s life-size charcoal work is a response to the curator’s challenge to draw a line between reality and fiction. The wall-piece was drawn simultaneously with both hands, tracing concentric movements that work outwards from an empty centre. Most of the works in the exhibition, about 37 in total, depending on who’s counting and who’s counted (works seem to have the tendency to appear and disappear over the course of the show), linger in a similarly indiscernible centre that evades taking shape. Though not all of the works here are on paper, the uniting quality is an ‘exchange between the literal and the literary’ - as the press release puts it. The divisions between substance and content are floating, as in Mark Geffriaud’s Small World Hobbies (2007), which presents a delicate origami recreation of a crumpled piece of paper next to its original.

Mariana Castillo Deball, Visage faux (detail, 2008)

‘Paper Exhibition’ is oddly reminiscent of Morten Harket’s struggle between physical and paper versions of himself in the video for a-ha’s ‘Take on Me’ (1985). A similar struggle can be seen in Mariana Castillo Deball’s paper masks that adorn the other wall of Artists Space’s central room. Visage faux (2008) consists of 24 replicas of indigenous masks made from folded A4 paper. The masks originate from the pages of art history books, though all imagery has been erased to leave only blank pages and image credits. These pages were then folded to mimic the shapes of the masks they once depicted, and the captions that once classified the masks according to terms foreign to their original context define the abstract folds instead.

Trong Gia Nguyen, Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Last Chapter-3062 words) (2009)

Shifting forms or the unstable essence of material is also a central idea in the work Trong Gia Nguyen’s Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Last Chapter-3062 words) (2009). Nguyen wrote the complete last chapter of the 1856 novel word for word on 3,062 kernels of rice. He collected the rice in a little bag that now hangs in the gallery space. The bag doubles as its own library card and has the information provided by a New York Library card imprinted on its surface. Like a Dadaist word game or the magnetic poetry on refrigerators, every movement of the bag creates thousands of new possible endings.

Gareth Spor, Dreamachine (Illusion is a Revolutionary Weapon) after William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Cerith Wyn Evans and Loris Gréaud) (2008)

The collective speculation of curator, artists and visitors that characterizes ‘Paper Exhibition’ is united in a search for the missing masterpiece or the missing link, something that grants a fleeting yet momentarily satisfying feeling of comprehension and legitimization. However, this link might not even be missing, rather just masquerading as something else in the show. The show should possibly be viewed like Gareth Spor’s Dreamachine (2008), with closed eyes - and what counts is not the object but rather its reflection on the retina of the viewer. And to escape from the alluring abyss of confusion and bewilderment that opens up one needs only to open one’s eyes. Still, something stays behind, faintly staining our vision just like the repetitive sounds of Robert Rauschenberg erasing a de Kooning in Mario Garcia Torres’ recording An undisclosed month in 1953 (2007), which remains audible long after one has left the paper space.

Anna Gritz