the commercial appeal body and shadow
BY FREDRIC KOEPPEL OCTOBER 11, 2013
The “Duality” expressed in the title of Holly Cole’s exhibition of new work at the Martha and Robert Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Memphis, through Oct. 25, could manifest itself in several ways.
There’s the duality of material and matter, of light and shadow, of paint and surface, even, to get personal, of Cole’s dual existence as artist and as songwriter and singer for the popular Memphis Dawls.
Cole works in strips of wood that she configures into sculptures of extreme, almost knotty angles, whose very substance we question when we see that the shadows they project on the wall are as important as the pieces themselves. Yet if it weren’t for the presence of the sculptures and the lights aimed at them, the shadows would not exist. You may fill in the blanks here with any metaphor you want to use concerning the ephemeral nature of corporeal being.
Take the show’s centerpiece, “Kink,” a sort of glitched Art Deco totem that gains impressive height on its pure white pedestal. The whiteness of the base is important because it offers a blank field of contrast to the piece’s fiery hues that start with hot pink at the bottom and shade to orange at the top. Seen from the front — that is, the colorful side — the work is deceptively monumental, sleek and sophisticated.
From the back, however, “Kink” presents a seemingly random geometry of untreated and unpainted wood, touched here and there with a few smudges of pigment or dirt. One gets the sense of a stage set, polished and well-crafted on the business side and left to its own devices on the side that’s hidden from the audience.
“Kink” is, in other words, a piece of theater, a highly effective exercise in the trickery that joins the (so-called) artificial and the (so-called) natural, as a stage set does. It’s a classic sort of duality that goes back to ancient Greek drama, or, in art terms, to the first period of Cubism, when Picasso and Braque glued pieces of newspaper to their paintings.
The implication is that “Duality,” while being immediately attractive and intriguing, is a thoughtful and even provocative exhibition that teases from us puzzles about reality and illusion, as in the large piece “Plaid,” in which six evenly spaced unpainted boards leaning against a wall cast a network of shadows complicated by bands of blue and red painted on the wall as if they, too, were shadows. The quality of the work in “Duality,” however, is uneven, and a few pieces — “Balance,” for example, and “Skew” — feel glib and undernourished, while another ambitious and overdetermined effort, “Luminesce,” fails technically because its material, a large, thick sheet of paper incised with lines and cutouts, is torquing under pressure and breaking the fragile connections.
Overall, though, “Duality” pleases and intrigues aesthetically and imaginatively, as well as presenting itself handsomely. You stand in Fogelman Gallery B, look around at Cole’s vivid colors and emphatic shapes and think, “This looks good.”
The memphis flyer Currently on View: Work by Huger Foote and Holly Cole
BY EILEEN TOWNSEND OCT 18, 2013
"At the University of Memphis Fogelman Gallery, Cole has an impressive solo exhibition, “Duality.” She was invited to show as a part of the Fogelman’s BFA Selects series, which features outstanding recent university alumni. The show, which opened earlier this month, ends October 25th.
Cole’s show features brightly hued sculpture and painting, and some pieces that are arguably both or neither. (What can you call a three dimensional piece mounted on a wall?) For her 3-D work, she uses prepared wood to create abstract, geometrical forms. The pieces are painted chemical shades of pink or blue or orange, and directly lit, so that shadows form a dense underlay for each work.
In some pieces, the Cole employs color gels to filter lighting on her pieces, so that different shadows are cast in different colors. Cole, who plays in the band The Memphis Dawls, says that she got the idea from stage lighting.
The show's most notable 2-dimensional work is a multimedia drawing that Cole executed on a faded projection screen. In the piece, black lines are cut out of the screen into a shape that echoes the geometries of the rest of the Cole’s work. The wall behind the screen is painted hot pink and under-lit, so that the drawing has an eerie dimensionality.
Cole’s work is almost too well-executed. For a show that depends heavily on changeable elements like light and shadow, and that deals in shapes that are organically wrought out of odd angles and joints, the overall effect is too contained. She could really get weird with it.
Both Cole and Foote are skilled makers whose work takes different approaches to important questions about how simplicity and form operate visually."
THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL abstract beauty lies below surface
BY FREDRIC KOEPPEL NOVEMBER 4, 2011
"Cole, a bachelor of fine arts candidate at the University of Memphis, offers five works, one of which is a painting, and four sculptures, three wood, one bronze. The painting, "WTF?!OMG!," actually is not abstract and does not convey the design sense and wit of the sculptures. As all good art should do, these pieces, especially the three wood constructions, make a claim - to borrow from the exhibition title - on the viewers' attention and imagination.
The somewhat awkwardly constructed exhibition title refers to the fact that the artist employs used materials in her work. The three wood pieces - "Trace," "Vestige" and "Contingency" - are made of reclaimed slats and narrow boards that retain evidence of their lives, in the form of a few scars and gouges, a chip out here, a split in the grain there, all elements that Cole allows a part in the composition. While we assume that the bronze piece, "Gleaming Pine," is not fashioned from used materials, the piece itself could function as a reclamation of sorts of the visual motif of juts and angles and mazelike Chutes and Ladders.
These three wall constructions hang in place - one reaches down and delicately touches the floor - and occupy space with complete confidence and aplomb. Even the two unpainted ones look elegant, sort of warm and brittle at the same time, while the painted one exerts its own dynamic of multiple stripes and colors. Here's the trick, though. "Trace" and "Vestige," the unpainted pieces, include the term "gouache" on the label description. Where would that gouache - a sort of thick watercolor - be?
It takes a patient eye to discern that the array of shadows cast by the lights shining through the struts and angles are false; they're gently and softly painted on the walls under the pieces, a device that deepens the implication of the ideas of "trace" and "vestige" while sneakily tricking our perceptions. I, for one, was happy to be hoodwinked in such an eloquent fashion."