Gallery Review: Holly Law's Trout Street
This column originally appeared in the September 12th and 13th edition of the Courier in Russellville, AR
The walls are down at the gallery space in Norman Hall on ATU’s campus, but it only makes the room look smaller. Like all that openness can actually shrink the space. Sculptures from local artist and University of Central Arkansas art professor Holly Laws line the walls and lay scattered on the floor, pinned under the dim glow of gallery lights.
Maybe it’s the broken, scattered toy feeling of the sculptures on the ground, but even before I’ve walked in, there’s something desolate hanging about the room. The pieces are neutral colors, whites and beiges; blacks and grays; their forms are large and unwieldy, twisting about themselves. Sculpture always feels lonely to me, something about how it interacts with space and time without being able to transform it. Imposing without being able to impose, as inert as we are in our own actions. (I don’t know why, actually, but it’s a thought.)
I’m not projecting with Trout Street though; the artist statement tells me that Trout Street titles itself after the artist’s parent’s address and comes after their loss. "Following their deaths, the address transformed from a place on a map into a landscape of memory and absence,” it reads. Well, I feel it. All that presence in the sculptures on the floor transforming into absence even while I look at them.
On the right once you’ve entered there’s a large white sculpture strewn about the floor, geometric and boxy. “House Geodes, Levittown Cape, 1947” reveals itself to be house forms in different sizes, though the same house over and over. Made from different kinds of plaster and alum crystals, the forms are crystallized over, cemented together at disheveled angles, often turned upside down to reveal the empty forms underbelly, looking like nothing more than a box until you get up close, until you see the whole thing. A house isn’t a home, it may not be anything more than the big box you keep your other boxes in when all the people you love are gone.
The sculptures on the floor directly in front as you enter, called “Amaryllis”, is handmade paper crafted into a large bulb and wilting flower. The sculpture resolves into the flower quickly, looking defeated, but from further away has the sense of driftwood or animal bones that have washed up, transformed, by a brutal tide. That all of it is paper seems inconceivable. Its bulb base appears so solid, heavy even, rounded and rooted and weighty. The flower petals, the empty stamins and wilting leaves, are ghostly whites and tans like aged parchment. In the air-conditioned sanctuary of Norman Hall, this human sized amaryllis looks as downtrodden as I feel when I step into the 100 plus degrees heat each afternoon.
Holly Laws is a multi-media sculpture artist, heavily influenced by craft works, but also exploring metal and the transformation of materials that might be outside of the sphere of “fine art”. Along the walls are hung a series of decorate laser cut images, some with repeating shapes, modelled after antique brooches. Laws uses different materials to cast these. “Cut steel, Rawhide” is laser cut rawhide—that is, the same material as the chew bones sold for dogs—which, thin as it is, looks like a dirty quartz crystal hammered flat, or the paper leaves of “Amaryllis” lit from behind. “Cut-Steel, Oval with Pampille, Rusted” has the same shape as the rawhide, but is made from laser cut paperboard layered with gesso, paint, and iron that is then rusted. The result is striking, looking solid as metal might, but thinner and presumably lighter than a traditional iron sculpture could ever be. A third and more varied set of these shapes, titled “A Collection of Notable Brooches, Dating from the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” contains this repeated form, but layered this time with burnished graphite, black and shiny as a pencil lead, though some of the shapes in this collection do without the graphite and remain paperboard.
The other sculpture on the wall is another version of a house, this time crushed by the weight of a brass looking antenna on the small, round face of which home movies play. Called “Loop (Movie House),” I stand and watch the movies and struggle to decide when the home movie might have been shot. There’s a boy playing a stringed instrument with gusto, something like a cigar box guitar. A white bird walks along someone’s hand. A young girl appears in a shiny princess dress with layers of pink. It is, mostly, faces. People laugh or hide themselves or pretend the camera isn’t there at all. When you do see flashes of clothing, it is a lot of striped shirts. When I see a woman in a head-to-toe plaid jumpsuit, form-fitted, her hair in a bouffant, I know that these are old images, not just ones made to look that way or given that impression with a filter or editing. These people, literally or not, are ghosts, their images retained on the video.
In case the message and its mediums missed you, there are replica mourning dresses on pedestals under glass domes on display too. About the size of a Barbie dress, these elaborate recreations of silk and lace date from 1860 designs and are so black as to suck in the light around them.
It is a small show, but more of it would be hard to swallow. Materials play out a dialogue of loss and transformation, the effects of damage rendered into beauty and then into ache. Casts of homes, emptied into shapes and divorced from their context, what could be homes become metaphor. Everything is empty, empty and ghosts flicker in technicolor on a small screen. There is absence everywhere.
Trout Street by Holly Laws will be on display until September 18th at the Norman Hall Art Gallery on Arkansas Tech University’s campus. The gallery is open from 8am to 5pm, Monday through Friday.
