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Dana Holst: She’s All That Dana Holst is primarily concerned with portraiture of women and girls— not singularly from a position for a viewer to gaze upon femininity, but as the creation of feminine characters, each imbued with her own desires, qualities and power—capable of not only returning a gaze, but also of seemingly drawing the viewer into their emotional lives, beyond the surface of each painted image. If we were to imagine the installation of Dana Holst’s gallery exhibition She’s All That metaphorically as a female body, the division wall serves as a frame of reference to separate the interior and exterior gaze of the woman. It is rare to find an artist with such a fully developed and yet divided oeuvre; Holst has two distinct and differing methodologies of practice.
RBC New Works Gallery Art Gallery of Alberta October 24, 2015 - February 15, 2016
The first series consists of highly worked oil paintings in the manner of traditional portraiture, brimming with controlled composition and tension of narrative. The artist consistently employs a ground of red ochre for these paintings, a technique popularized by Vermeer, giving a life-like quality to tones of flesh created stratigraphically from thin transparent layers of paint and varnish sitting atop this blood-coloured base. The traditional technique lends a hyperrealistic effect: “many painterly effects can critically depend on the layer build-up, the translucent shine of colourful tissues, the suggestion of shadow in the flesh tones or the convincing illusion of an object’s texture realized by deliberately including the optical contribution of lower layers.”1 Holst’s second body of work is presented as an overwhelming salonstyle installation of impastoed black and white portraits of women, filling a recto ‘cellar’ space in the gallery, positioned behind the formal ‘parlour’ portraits. Entitled Girls! Girls! Girls!, it is a series of gestural oil and encaustic paintings on paper, grey-scale manifestations of unbridled, unconscious expressionism—dark in the fervency of application and not just in the inherent toxicity of their caustic medium. Holst begins in the same way for the creation of both bodies of work: mining the internet for captivating representations of women and
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Unspoiled Gender, 2015 Oil and encaustic on paper 55.88 x 38.1 cm 4
adolescent girls. She scours auction websites for archetypal, vintage images of the feminine portrayed with an exclusive purpose of being viewed: child victims in cropped crime scene photographs from the 1950s, stills of Hollywood B-level actresses in film noir dramas, post-mortem family documentation of turn-of-the-century corpses overdressed in lilies and ribbons, tense Victorians assembled in parlour mise-en-scènes. These images are culled as a source archive in Holst’s studio: lining the drawers of her portfolio storage cabinet, each is marked with its place of origin, sometimes with a heart wrenching newspaper caption pasted to the back, the circumstances of the crime or demise of the subject in terse, evocative detail that is often censored in current newspapers. Holst studies these images, the rich narrative detail found with these early photographic documents providing the critical elements that together comprise the whole of each character in her artworks. Both bodies of work, the encaustic works and oil paintings, are collages of the eccentric details culled from these source images.
Acid Attack, found within the pin-up style expanse of encaustic works in the recessed ‘cellar’ section of the exhibition, Girls! Girls! Girls!, is inspired by a 1950s film still from The Hypnotic Eye, in which a hypnotist crosses the ethical line of his profession into an arena of sexual innuendo, puppet-mastering serial acts of violence inflicted upon the women attending his performances. Under the spell of the hypnotist, the bewitched women begin a downward spiral of titillating self-mutilation. Holst reworks one image still of an actress casting acid on upon her own face in a fit of passion: “under the post-hypnotic power of a criminal hypnotist, the blonde Merry Anders has just destroyed her own beauty,” reads the verso caption of the scene still. 2 Holst manages to transfer the fervent energy of this self-destructive action through the gestural mark of waxed pigment on paper, firmly affixing a moment of horror in a new media. The film’s plotline fascinated the artist: it was not a violation implicitly enacted by the hypnotist himself that captured her but the actions of the women themselves. Holst summarizes, “In that era, and still today, men will attack women when they don’t behave the way they like. But the way this man does it is by getting inside their mind, so they violate themselves… for him.”3 John Berger articulates this division in the constructed identity of the feminine within the canon of the female nude in portraiture: existing in essence as an “appearance” or “sight,” women “watch themselves being looked at” by both men, women and even themselves.4 In Ways of Seeing, he elaborates: A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her… To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself… she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. 5 5
Holst’s dualistic interest is centred on the experience of pain and transcendence held within the constructed and externalized image of feminine beauty. She aims to expose these parallel experiences in subtle gestures embedded within each portrait—the longer you look at an image of a woman, the more there appears to be something slightly askew, something just a little bit ‘off.’
Confinement is a theme threading through several of the works. The physical withholding of a Watteau-inspired disportation of women inside a domestic space, or a colourful ribboned dress within a stark cellar environment, invite subversive suppositions surrounding the characters Holst creates. They are subversive not only in reference to the architectural confines and associated behavioural roles within which women in the 1930s were expected to occupy, but also in the subject of confinement of the female body itself as it relates to the eventual outcome of sexual promiscuity—the confinement of pregnancy, the death of innocence found within the transition of girlhood to womanhood.
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No Funny Business, 2015 Oil and encaustic on paper 33.02 x 46.36 cm
100 Strokes, a title conflating a perverse sexual allusion with a standard beauty tip, depicts the stately profile of a woman, a hairbrush firmly positioned in the hair at the nape of her neck. Another portrait in the Girls! Girls! Girls! installation, the work’s source image is that of an early 1930s film actress, Katherine DeMille, an orphan from Vancouver heavily involved in the bourgeoning Canadian cinema industry. Holst describes the portrait as one pregnant with an “overture of violence.”6 DeMille’s pose highlights her aristocratic, aquiline nose, while her statuesque figure, leaning forward, further elongates her ivory neck and décolletage. But a viewer’s eye fixates on the mannish width of the wrist grasping the handle of the hairbrush, lost in her thick tresses. Holst’s framing of the scene intentionally implants the question of whether that arm is the actress’ own, or perhaps the arm of another person situated out of view, above the subject, pushing the brush through her hair in an act of petting love or fetishistic aggression. The artist positions the viewer of the artwork itself within the duad of a dominant-submissive frame of relationality.
Casket Baby is inspired by a source photograph from the 1920s of the then-youngest recorded girl to give birth in the USA. Holst purchased this original International Newsreel Photo online, which was circulated with the headline and caption: “She’s Youngest Mother at 13.”7 For the artist, this image of transformation from a state of girlhood to motherhood, skipping the natural evolution of arriving at womanhood beforehand, encapsulated a state of grief and loss. Holst’s painting gives the girl the weighted, locked jawline montaged from a second source photograph, that of a dead man in a coffin. Images of the feminine from eras noted for sexual repression are of particular interest to Holst: the ‘tramp art’ frame is key to the work Crown of Thorns. Tramp art frames derived from handmade Scandinavian folk art are traditionally elaborate ensconcements for family portraits reminiscent 7
Casket Baby (detail), 2015 Oil on canvas 76.2 x 101.6 x 7.62 cm Courtesy of Artist
of Jesus’ crucifixion crown, the genealogical cross in multiple, and the hand-formed construction wood joinery of a domestic space from this era. The parlour was itself a frame designed to present a woman socially in the interior setting of her home. The upholstered floral settees, the placement of furniture and the liberating symbolism of Victorian fetishization of the asexually reproducing, rhizomatic fern in its exotic ceramic pot, were all extensions of a woman’s carefully comprised exteriority. As such, the parlour linked women’s physical forms to the fashions and mannerisms of presentation and decorum of the day. Decoration was constitutive of the parlour, not an optional act… Whether hideous or not, parlours did not appear by accident. These spaces came into being as a result of a considerable expenditure of…social energy. 8
Published in 1973, Lesy created Wisconsin Death Trip as a collection of historical records regarding the booming Scandinavian immigrant communities in the Wisconsin and Minnesotan woods. He reassembled early photographic images and newspaper captions to point to the personal dramas and devastating madness of this modern era, encapsulating the psychological implications of the isolated experience of transplanted immigrant families – specifically emphasizing the roles of women. The book eventually inspired a cult film of the same title by James Marsh circa 1999. After a studio visit in 2014, Holst then borrowed the book and utilized it in her research for some of the works in the exhibition. 10
Self Loathing, 2011 Oil on panel 40.64 x 40.64 cm
A woman sitting in the parlour must present behavior that differed from her actions in other domestic spaces (such as the kitchen or cellar), each action and consequential signatory indicator differing in each compartmentalized space of the home. Michael Lesy’s book Wisconsin Death Trip illustrates this dichotomy by focusing on the fingers of the women captured in turn of the century parlour photographs: the hand laid across the shoulders of the husband, upon magnification, reveals a work-worn reality in contrast to the figure’s corseted dress and serene staged setting.
The tone of Lesy’s artist book itself aligns with the approach Holst uses to excise the psychologically affecting core, or needling Barthes-esque ‘punctum’ of her chosen images: the attempt at reassembling new narratives of feminine identity by focusing on the disturbing details 11
Upstairs, 2015 Oil and encaustic on paper 55.88 x 38.1 cm
Holst’s paintings achieve the same oscillation between truth and dramatized fiction found in the image of the feminine: there is equally what should be presented, the outside, and the inside story inherent to each of her works, defined not by the observer but by the fabricated characters Holst brings to life. The interiority of these characters then defies the very origins of their fashioning, decisive in opposing their own limited state of presence within the paintings, gazing defiantly back and daring a viewer with true covetousness to challenge their embodied power: a complex and divided question of what a woman might be. Kristy Trinier Curator, Art Gallery of Alberta
The Basement, 2013 Oil on panel 40.64 x 40.64 cm
found within existing images of women and the spaces they inhabit, before (and arguably after) the feminist revolution. Holst states her viewpoint as “gynocentric” and emphasizes that female identity remains a complex construct still bound in social hierarchies.
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Endnotes 1 Stijn Legrand et al., “Examination of historical paintings by state-of-the-art hyperspectral imaging methods: from scanning infra-red spectroscopy to computed X-ray laminography,” Heritage Science 2, no. 13 (2014): 1. 2 Author Unknown, Untitled photograph, Collection of Dana Holst. 3 Dana Holst, in studio visit with the author, July 22, 2015. 4 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Viking, 1973), 47. 5 Ibid., 46. 6 Dana Holst, in studio visit with the author, July 22, 2015. 7 Original photographic scene still, verso photograph caption, photographer unknown. Collection of Dana Holst. 8 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 36. 13
Artist’s Biography Dana Holst is an artist based in Edmonton, working primarily in painting, drawing and printmaking. Holst’s work is an on going investigation into the human experience, focusing on the self and its place within society. Themes of social stereotyping and power struggles between the sexes are habitual for Holst who obsesses with depicting the female experience in conflict. Holst received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Her work is included in private collections in North America and the public collections of Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Art Bank and Glenbow Museum. Writer’s Biography Kristy Trinier is a Curator at the Art Gallery of Alberta. She previously was the Public Art Director at the Edmonton Arts Council, where she managed the City of Edmonton’s Public Art Collection, as well as related exhibitions and public art programs. Trinier holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Art and English from the University of Victoria, and a Master’s degree in Public Art from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI, ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten) as a Huygens scholar in The Netherlands. List of Works
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Casket Baby, 2015 Oil on canvas 76.2 x 101.6 x 7.62 cm Courtesy of Artist
Self Loathing, 2011 Oil on panel 40.64 x 40.64 cm Private Collection
Crown of Thorns, 2015 Oil on panel in antique frame 50.8 x 50.8x 17.78 cm Courtesy of Artist
She’s All That, 2015 Oil on panel, 120.65 x 182.88 x 7.62 cm Courtesy the Artist
Girls! Girls! Girls!, 2015 Installation, oil and encaustic on paper Dimensions variable Courtesy of Artist
The Basement, 2013 Oil on panel 40.64 x 40.64 cm Private Collection
The RBC New Works Gallery features new works by Alberta artists. Initiated in 1998 and named the RBC New Works Gallery in 2008, this gallery space continues the Art Gallery of Alberta’s commitment to supporting Alberta artists.
© Art Gallery of Alberta 2015 ISBN: 978-1-77179-014-7 Editor: Catherine Crowston Design: Cut+Paste Design Inc. and Charles Cousins Photography: Dana Holst Essay: Kristy Trinier Printing: Burke Group Printed in Canada
The Art Gallery of Alberta is grateful for the generous support of our many public and private donors and sponsors, as well as the ongoing support of the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Cover Image: One Hundred Strokes, 2015 Oil and encaustic on paper, 76.2 x 55.9 cm 15
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