Deborah-Joyce Holman: Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness, 28 May 2022 — 23 Jul 2022
Exhibitions

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

In a new series of oil paintings for the Zurich project space Sentiment, Deborah-Joyce Holman engages a radical project of slowness, drawing on the language of the screenshot by magnifying stills of staged interior spaces of Black lesbian relations sourced from television and cinema.

Murwiesenstrasse 45, 8057 Zurich

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.

Contacts & Details

VENUE:

Sentiment

OPENING TIMES:

Fri 2pm – 6pm
Sat 2pm – 6pm
Sun 2pm – 6pm
T: +41774722802

ADDRESS
Murwiesenstrasse 45, 8057 Zurich
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