VANESSA HOLYOAK

Vanessa Holyoak (U.S., Canada) is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist working across installation, photography, video, performance, and language. She constructs uncanny, minimalist environments that allude to notions of memory, loss, and the cognitive overload of the present, often working as an artist duo with Antoine Chesnais. Through dreamlike juxtapositions of objects, moving and still images, light, and sound articulated through a speculative fiction lens, her work raises questions about cultural and ecological displacement and disappearance, both present and potential. She also writes hybrid fiction and art criticism and is researching the liberatory potential of dreams, sleep, and darkness across both literature and visual art. Holyoak holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from the California Institute of the Arts and a BA from Barnard College. She is a PhD candidate in Comparative Media & Culture at USC, where she is also pursuing the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate. Select exhibitions include Casa Lü in CDMX, Columbia University and Beyond Studios in NYC, Willow Street Gallery in Washington, D.C., CCA PLAySpace in San Francisco, and Harkawik, Eastside International, Nomad Pavilion, the Bendix Building, Human Resources, and CalArts in LA. Her writing has been published in BOMB, e-flux, East of Borneo, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Hyperallergic. Forthcoming exhibitions include Au Pair and LA Artcore, and her first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, is forthcoming from Sming Sming Books in May 2023.