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DANA HOLST |
Essays & Reviews |
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The Globe
and Mail Dana Holst's painted babies look hot enough to explode: chubby little time bombs waiting to go off. Eschewing all conventional ways of depicting babies -- as fragrant, petal-soft bundles of idealized joy, for example -- the virtuoso Edmonton-based painter opts instead to build up her paintings from backgrounds suffused with a searing scarlet pigment, a scarlet so characteristic of the young artist's work that I'm tempted to rechristen it Holst Red. The result is that whatever she paints, including babies, looks as if it's molten at the core. Holst's Baby Doll Project, now at Toronto's Katharine Mulherin Gallery is the last chapter in a series of such works. Here, as is invariably the case with Holst, her beautifully painted, red-hot babies are made to bear a certain pressure of social critique. With titles like Sexy Baby, Leaky Baby, Bird Baby and Goon Baby, it's pretty clear that Holst is not out to provide portraits for Pabulum boxes. The flushed faces of Holst's babies are often too old for their bouncy baby bodies; her Goon Baby looks like a strange, haunted old man scaled down into baby clothes. Their expressions, too, are disturbing, not winsome. The poignant, open-mouthed visage of her Sick Baby, for example, speaks more to demonic possession than to the need for a diaper change or the onset of a slightly elevated fever. Sometimes, Holst places her overheated babies in odd, surreal poses; in her Baby Doll Pieta, a supine baby wearing a yellow smock rests its head in the lap of a second baby, this one upright and dressed in the usual eyeball-raking red. In the disturbing Nice Doggie, a painting in which the figures are gathered at the centre of a red field almost too hot to look at, a baby girl and her charming boy-baby companion are shown paying perhaps too much attention to a Doberman Pinscher twice their size. Holst's babies are what critic Jessica Wyman, in her gallery essay, calls "incumbent women and men." The throbbing, sanguine infants embody our deepest anxieties about the meaning and limits of caring for a child, about our preoccupation with the child's sensuality and sexuality, about the nature of parental responsibility juxtaposed with the child's galloping sense of individuality. All these issues rush together in the wild red heat of these extraordinary paintings.
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