Lisa Holden at Ron Mandos galerie, Rotterdam (2000)
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 12 October 2011
This interview was previously published in World Sculpture News, 6(4), pp. 51-3 in 2000 with the title "Dissecting reality".
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Left: Lisa Holden. Canvas, (2000). Performance view of Holden behind canvas-framed window with spotlight, introducing UNLEASHED. Right: Lisa Holden. Seed III and Seed IV (installation view), (both 2000). Pixellated digital photographs, reflected in a pre-war period mirror which survived the bombing campaign. Both prints 33.1 x 46.81”.
In some ways, looking at Lisa Holden’s art is like watching the Jerry Springer show. Guest #1 tables a narrative— the truth apparently complete. Yet new information is revealed, and reality shifts and twists, leaving the viewer with multiple truths, and not knowing what to believe. Holden’s artwork plays on these layers. In a romantic, futile quest for meaning of both past and present, she interprets and projects a society living in fact-fiction fusions.
In her recent site-specific installation, UNLEASHED, Lisa Holden positioned a former two-story residence— now Ron Mandos Gallery in Rotterdam, the Netherlands— as a historical container of voices, memories, discourses, fantasies, and spirits which the viewer experienced through sight and sound art. Experiential voicescapes and sound remixes were combined with performance-installation and digital photographs. Infusing her own experiences into the site, the result blended stories across past and present, layers of fact and fiction, memory and fantasy.
Thirty-eight-year-old Holden, British-born, Netherlands resident, has been featured in many group shows in 2000. At Amsterdam’s Arti et Amicitae, Holden was pitted against Yasumasa Morimura in Cos[tume]-Play, which featured several Japanese and Netherlands-based artists. At the Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, the United Kingdom, Holden bizarrely opposed British drag-star-turned-art-curiosity Divine David in Apocalypse Now and Next Week! Additionally, Holden participated in Location at Elastic Gallery in Sydney, and the Brussels Art Fair with Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London. UNLEASHED’s curator, R.J. Preece, interviewed Lisa Holden about the installation’s various layers, which were both visible and invisible to viewers.
R.J. Preece: Your artwork has been negatively criticized by some in Holland’s art scene as being too "heavy". How do you respond to this?
Lisa Holden: My work deals with stripping back the masks we present to our world. It’s just a reflection of the reality around us— and I want to dissect that reality, not run away from it. If delving into the psyche and our inability to control our realities is "heavy", then so be it.
R.J. Preece: What was your starting point for UNLEASHED?
Lisa Holden: In general, my work deals with notions of truth and appearances, hidden agendas and discourses, and the impact this has on the individual. With UNLEASHED, I considered the site to be a container of these discourses, and I wanted to explore the psychology of the house’s former inhabitants, yet spin it with interpretation. The house as a “container” of different things— past and present— continued as a reference point.
I found two aspects of the site particularly interesting: the history of the house— built around 1910— within the context of Rotterdam’s history, a city almost entirely obliterated during the World War II bombing. The house survived this, functioning as an architectural ghost in a city dominated by Post-War construction. One can only imagine what the house saw, what the residents experienced— and the smells. I interviewed survivors, and they kept talking about the smell, they couldn’t get it out of their clothes. Second, for 60 years before the house became a gallery in 1998, two brothers and a sister lived there, all unmarried. This was my starting point.
Lisa Holden interview: 1 | 2 | 3
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