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Fashion
Entertainment
Artists
Fiction |
Desirée Holman is a mad scientist, digging up familiar characters fresh from their pop culture graves for eerie, ethereal dance parties. While the spectre of America’s once-idealized family units from “The Cosby Show” and “Roseanne” repeat their well-worn sitcom drama ad nauseum in the purgatory of syndication, Holman breathes fresh life into these iconic Hollywood approximations of domesticity, granting their forelorn characters a brief moment of freedom in her most recent video piece, The Magic Window.  Displayed over three channels simultaneously, the piece begins with stifled re-enactments of both sitcoms. Voiceless actors portray each character with unsettling familiarity, sporting semi-recognizable face masks like sheets of skin from the personal collection of Hannibal Lecter. On the left screen, we see the Connors lounging about in their filthy living room and then begrudgingly cleaning the mess. On the right, the Huxtables are dealing with a typical “Cosby Show” predicament: the kids try to hide the lamp that they’ve carelessly broken with the toss of a football. Eventually, both families meet in the center screen and find themselves transported to a Matrix-esque nowhere place, where, surrounded by an ectoplasmic glow, they earnestly engage in the rave of the millenium. Finally, they’re sent back to their separate living room universes, gazing dead-eyed into their televisions for some quality family time. Holman’s body of work hovers around the idea of performance in familial relationships. In Art as Therapy, she recreates a real life family from an arbitrary daytime talk show with a series of life-size dolls, which she then uses to act out a family therapy session, voicing each character herself. Bucolic Life is a series of staged snapshots starring Holman as the flesh-and-blood matriarch of a family unit that’s otherwise comprised of mannequin substitutes for the real thing. Even her atypical works, like Troglodyte, which features a group of actors in chimpanzee outfits, tend to ruminate on the questionable sanctity of familial bonds: a still photo from the project portraying a chimp family embracing each other on a warm hillside bears the skeptically clinical title Reciprocal Altruism.  The feeling Holman’s work instills within her viewers arises from a deep, dark well of human history, provoking an exciting sense of unease. She’s placing primordial instincts within contemporary contexts: mining the uncanny valley and forcing her audience to ask questions about the source of their own emotions in the midst of electronic dance songs and pop culture references. After meeting Ms. Holman at Machine Project’s opening of The Magic Window, I was lucky enough to engage with her in an e-mail interview. Read on to learn more about humanity’s evolving definition of family, the collaborative experience behind The Magic Window, and those menacing, magnificent masks. |