Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes at Towards, Toronto

Towards is pleased to present Dear Big Hush, an exhibition of recent work by Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes.

“So I work to make myself into a seer — And let’s close with a pious hymn.” — Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny, 1871.

I have often thought of Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes’ oeuvre as an ode to the surface, a space she approaches via the photographic and the imagistic. Within certain artistic discourses (particularly in the realm of painting) surface has been a concern for about half a millennium — variably as an illusionistic window, as a space marked by its flatness, or as a pedestal for the sculptural application of paint or the accumulation of materials. This is not to say that Holmes’ work is not situated within this teleology. Rather, her work takes this engagement with surface and fragments it, drawing it into dialogue with other disciplines such as music, design, and craft. The focus here is to draw attention to the ways in which material, surface and framing dictate the reception of the image — a challenge to the idea of the image as a standalone object and the over reliance on historical context as the clarifying device for the image par excellence.

Music, graphic design, and patterning almost take precedent to the image itself within Holmes’ work. This is to say her interest lies in the way in which the frame is the critical moment to make sense of meaning, affect, and connotation. Take, for example, her use of matboard. Typically used as a sort of pedestal for an image-based work, it is akin to a spotlight, honing our attention to the composition as a whole within the larger structure of a frame. In her case, it sits halfway; her images are mounted underneath in a passe-partout but rather framing in the whole of the composition, they obfuscate the bulk of the picture. However, geometric cut-outs and peepholes re-hone our focus in the form, and thus constitute an almost dialectical negotiation of the mat’s function.

In her work, she mobilizes analogue means of framing and editing her images which she pulls from an array of sources—friends, family, pets, and found images all constitute her pictorial building blocks. But it is precisely her use of the analogue that speaks to the contemporary and digital. The litany of referents and images existing in schizoid tandem is evidently akin to the ways in which we are now subject to an endless deluge of content but by extension her interest in framing and surfaces speaks to the ways in which we consume this flood. The image no longer (and honestly, never did) exist on its own.