Deborah-Joyce Holman: Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness

For the “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” exhibition, the artist choose laborious medium like oil, like the ‘true’ absence of the figure in the depicted, staged interiors, indexes the artist’s grappling with the nature of representation and the potential of the hand in relation to the symbolic realm of the ‘real.’ The media industry constructs fictional or dramatized interior spaces with real coded symbols and semiotic choreographies; in magnifying or elaborating these stills, Holman explores how the depicted domestic site becomes an extension of the fictional protagonists and their attempts at real relation in the midst of an orchestrated nexus of semantic overdetermination.

While the works are in a sense figurative, in another sense they also refuse to engage the western dualism of abstract/concrete, preferring instead a liminal space that is flexible enough to engage not only the overdetermined narratives distributed in mass media (particularly regarding Black gay women and nonbinary people) but also what we might call the ‘asemic’ potential of the marks the hand can make with the oil medium.