Words

Artist Statement

I am a participant observer employing subjective conceptual documentary practice. My approach to photography is conflicted and perverse, bringing gesture, hazard and a painterly sensibility into this technical media, allowing chance elements to slip into the work. The work I am most attracted to is dark and blurry, the dark pond. Photography is light, all about light; I delve into the dark pond. Not the perfect moment but in many moments of imperfection that make up the whole of our messy lives and selves, pointing at something just out of our perceptual reach.

Indeterminacy is the philosophy championed by pioneer experimental multidisciplinary artist John Cage that opens up artistic practice to the random as a way of radically breaking from tradition, convention and habit. As Cage said, “Indeterminacy in art is made not as an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.”

Gravitating toward things from which the hegemony turns away – Approaching us, the marginalized, and colluding subjectively to create a space to speak. I want my work to be meaningful and transformative. Work that is unexpected.  Dealing paradox: the cognitive dissonance between estrangement and recognition, aversion and attraction, harshness and beauty, bravura and restraint, outrageousness and subtlety, expressionism and classicism.

SD Holman