General Artist Statement 2016
Lets get one thing straight, I’m photo-based artist, not a commercial or fine art photographer; Photographers work in a controlled, even scientific, environment. 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 most technical of media, I purposefully allow chance elements to slip into my shooting. The work I am most attracted to is dark and blurry, what I call the ‘dark pond.’ Photography is light, all about light; I delve into the dark pond. I do not believe in the perfect moment, but many moments of imperfection that make up the whole of our messy lives and selves, pointing at something just out of our perceptual reach.
Right now I am interested in Indeterminacy (among other things), 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.”
I work on a project-by-project basis, and summarily refuse a signature style. Each new project is different from the last, from how it is shot, to its installation, determined by the unique needs of the situation. I consider all of my work to be portraiture, whether it portrays a person, a place or a thing. I gravitate toward things from which the rest of the world turns away – I approach the marginalized, and work subjectively with them to create a space where hopefully we can speak. I want my work to be meaningful and transformative. I like photographs that are unexpected. I deal in 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
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Nature Morte
Ongoing series from 2011
I feel completely at a loss & inarticulate around the death of my beloved wife Catherine who drown in a plane crash. I started to photograph her things. What started as a way of recording ‘stuff’ that I knew someday I would have to let go of has become a mediation on loss & the life imbued in everyday things, the objects of the dead.
I am photographing absence. When I was asked to show this work I said it is too soon, but there is nothing else I think about except her…
Things, they were just things, right? They are just things but they become something else when the person is dead, no longer here; fetish objects imbued with the divine that is how they feel to me when I photograph them I can see & feel her both present & absent, do you? These small icon boxes at once lonely & glorifying empty & full. They are in fact part of her or rather she part of them, science tells us that her DNA is there, tiny particles of Catherine; parts of her are in those clothes on the things is it transubstantiation (catherine would get a kick out of that) has she become these things, all I have left except for fallible memory.
I try to reach out to her though the water through time in messages through the only means I know, art.
I hope these pieces let you feel & connect to some loss you feel deeply but may be unable to articulate.
SD Holman