Holly Lane: Not Enough Time to Love the World
Holly Lane—Not Enough Time to Love the World, on view August 2 through January 12, showcases a range of Lane’s work garnered from the previous ten-plus years of a multi-decade career. As an art undergraduate, she began considering the relationship of frame to picture. She has since reimagined it into a new art form of her own invention, in which each component—painting and frame—is fundamental to the work as a whole. In a striking symbiosis, she unites each of her paintings with an intricately ornamented wood frame that she designs and carves for it. Her work expresses a profound amalgamation of heartfelt respect for the natural world, particularly the animal kingdom, and architectural and painterly expertise, plus musings on the autonomy of women, world mythology and philosophy.
Concurrently, Holly Lane—In the Artist’s Studio, on view August 23 through January 26, a part of NUMU’s innovative ongoing series, offers a rare opportunity for access into Lane’s meticulous step-by-step artistic process. Long a habitual hiker, she develops many of her subject ideas from time spent observing or immersed in the natural world. Hiking photographs, along with sketch books, design layouts, color trials, preparatory diagrams, drawings, and paintings, plus painting and woodworking tools, and works in process will provide invaluable insight into the studio of a contemporary artist whose methods are more closely aligned with a Medieval-era artisan’s workshop.
This exhibition can be found in the Mike & Alyce Parsons Reception.
Holly Lane
While pondering the nature of frames, I found some illuminated manuscripts in the University library, and saw how the borders visually commented on the text, sometimes even spoofing the text. From this discovery I realized that a frame could be many things; it could be a commentary, an informing context, an environment, a fanfare, a shelter, it could extent movement, it could be a conceptual or formal elaboration, it could embody ancillary ideas, it could be like a body that houses and expresses the mind, and many other rich permutations. From that point I began to create pieces that fused frame and painting, with some pieces having doors that open and close over paintings to suggest; contingency, potentiality, future, past, or cause and effect.
To experience the space of a painting we project our minds into the painting, consequently I see pictorial space as mind space. The spatial qualities of sculpture exist in our own physical space; we walk around it, proportion our bodies to it - in part it is apprehended or 'seen' by the body. By fusing sculptural frames with pictorial images I hope to address both modes of aesthetic perception.
Some re-occurring themes are: interspecies compassion, philosophical proofs of animal cognition (e.g. the correction of errors, pretense, and awareness of other minds), veiled symbolism, re-presenting women from a woman artist's perspective, exploring the hidden implications, or the backstory of myths, eco-psychology and nature mysticism.
In addition to the frame/painting pieces, in recent years I have begun a series of purely sculptural pieces of gilded carved wood. Each gold sculpture starts solely with the relationships of forms and shapes guided by a love of proportion. Only when the sculpture is complete do I see the iconographical and philosophical sources that subconsciously fed my decisions and creative process. Body-like the gilding layers a radiant skin onto the form.
Visually, I am drawn to; architecture, light on water, ecclesiastical furniture, clouds, lace, freak vegetables, models of the internal organs of various species, the contours of soft serve ice cream, stalactites, stalagmites, fungi, crowded forms, sooty lines, diffused edges and evening light.
