Evan Holloway “Scripted and Scored”

Opening Friday 28 September 2007, from 7 to 9.30 pm

From 28 September to 9 November 2007

Evan Holloway’s artistic research has always been concentrated on the theme of a work’s interaction with a series of external features. Upholder of an art that shuns the immobility of the “fetish”, the Californian artist sounds every possible relation the object can have with what is beyond it or is it’s opposite.

The aim is to interrupt the isolation of the artistic work, usually banished in a space which is torn away from the context, and to abolish any sort of categorization that would pigeonhole it in a specific genre.

With this we see the creation of sculptures in which a three-dimensional object finds its alter ego in its graphic transposition, trying to suggest a multidirectional reading, or a series of metallic grates, the texture of which induces the spectator to a discontinuous vision, and consequently, to a reflection on the visual processes. The participative fruition of the observer represents the completion of the work. Its meaning is not a given value, an axiom, but simply is the attribution of a quality, determined by infinite variables. For this exhibition Holloway places the accent on the cause/effect binomial, determined by the interaction between a number of inputs and outputs.

The title itself “Scripted and Scored” summarizes the concept. There are no more unlimited variables, everything is mathematically programmed and ordered. The fruition of the work is not left to an individual and multi-shaped reading but is scientifically piloted. Interactivity is never denied, but only subtracted to circumstance: it’s enclosed in the work itself. Two of the works presented, “Music Videos” and “Counting Robot”, perfectly represent this idea. In the first, a  number of banal actions – recorded with a surveillance camera – like throwing dice, going up and down stairs, turning a playing card, are tied one to the other by an acoustic effect. This number of sounds determines itself a further sound track, inspired to XX century music composition from Cage to Schoenberg, from Crumb to the Minimalists.

In the second, instead, a cylinder covered in copper is connected, through electric wires, to some neon lights placed on a wooden frame which has a structure that is similar to a digital led. The rotation of the cylinder makes the lights go on and off, and this combination gives birth to a numerical sequence. What both these works want to highlight is the essential value that order and codes assume in relation to our social behaviour. So, to a certain action corresponds a specific reaction in a strictly disciplined process.

It’s like in gambling, when the final score is tightly connected to a number of rules, and the value of a move is numerically pre-established. So numbers are intended by Holloway as a rational element, but also symbolic and ritual. A thought expressed in “Numerical Sculptures”: metallic thread-like numbers from which small papier-mâché heads ramify, extemporal masks, bound to an arcahic memory. A fusion of the aesthetical, scientific and anthropological values, emblematically sum up the artist’s figure.