Rainbows spill from metallic mixing bowls. Hair spirals in swirling defiance of gravity. From a bouquet of flowers bursts a garden. My impulse, often, is to centre a description of Holly’s paintings on an action. Though this may seem at odds with her explicit framing of them as still lifes, the way she depicts domestic scenes and everyday objects is extra-ordinary. The large scale of her paintings for LOOKER at Hunt Gallery heightens a sense of object-agency that spurs this impulse for me. Looking at their expansive surfaces again my eyes wander:


Who is the viewer of this painting? Is it me? How big am I?


Peering into the reflective surface of the massive bowl that fills the kitchen table of her painting titled Scrying Orb, I could have had a shrinking spell cast on me or simply be placed in a position of child-like wonder. That words such a “magical,” “psychedelic” or “fantastical” are also apt descriptions for the various animated objects and mis en scènes of Holly’s still lifes does not seem like a leap. Her paintings and the objects depicted within them are without a doubt cathectic: they appear to be invested with an emotional and psychological charge. Nonetheless, these adjectives—that can imply various forms of animism—are equally a framework of meaning-making that is imparted by the viewer in the act of looking. Indeed, it is interesting, and possibly telling, to see what in the paintings speak to a particular viewer. 



Now, let’s take a step back and look through the exhibition’s peephole—its title. A “Looker” is someone (or something) to look at. It can describe someone we find attractive, someone who fixes our sight—a gesture which is often objectifying. “Looker” can also refer to the one who is doing the looking, treating them as the centre of an action directed outward. Or, such as in “on looker,” someone who spectates without getting implicated in an event, and who, in the looking, is pushed outside of the action. In each case someone and something are caught in an act—whether it is the someone looking or the thing that is being looked at, both seemingly point in the opposite direction.

This tension and uncertainty in looking are at work in Holly’s paintings—the looker is both the painting and the viewer. The bursts, highlights, and other painted-indexicals are symbols for the field of attraction a looker can find themselves in. The directness and placement of these marks on the image’s surface point to how the paintings (and painter) are dealing directly with structures and strategies in painting. More than just depicting cathectic objects, the paintings depict how they affect us, the representational power of the medium to generate and play with this affect, and the compositional power for images to do so. They are also analytical in their breaking down and re-composing of representational tropes and iconography from art history—such as halos in medieval paintings and recurring subjects in the genre of still life. Though, in their creation there is still a bit of magic—despite what the artist might want me to say.

While the larger paintings command the space of the main gallery, LOOKER also contains a library of smaller works. In Holly’s studio practice, these vignette-like paintings congeal a quick moment of joy or clarity attained while unraveling the larger knot of the big paintings. In their scale and brevity, they are more immediately digestible and permit a viewer to hone in on details. They guide the viewer into the process of looking, isolating compositional strategies, such as depictions of light, movement, and scale, that Holly plays with and that draw our eyes across the image-plane. In doing so these smaller paintings function almost like a reading-key in the exhibition.

Across all the paintings in LOOKER there are moments that are alluring and accessible in their “technical” or “realistic” rendering, but these are thrown off-kilter with decisions-in-paint that resist both the illusion of immediate-knowing and instant gratification. There is a respect for the paint itself as an image-making material and painting as anything but immediate. This line of thinking can be interpreted along trite Modernist talking points about painting; however, they take on a wholly new field of meaning when reframed today in a world of images and objects that are ceaselessly made to appear more convenient and immediate—a context of mediatized-sociality, imagery cast like spells and the summoning of objects at the point of a finger. The tensions that Holly works on in painting build out the process of how an object-image affects us. In this work—a work of looking and painting, that operates on painting as an act of looking, and with enough attentiveness, may bring to looking a quality of painting—there is a commitment to the disclosure of a world, a commitment to perception.