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DANA HOLST |
Essays & Reviews |
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The Globe and
Mail Given the fact that paintings making up Dana Holst's new exhibition Dancing Girls, Act II are all so molten red and velvety black they're almost hot to the touch, it's a bit of a surprise, frankly, to discover how popular, how deeply desirable they have turned out to be. The smoldering redness of Holst's paintings continues merrily in the bright rash of red dots now punctuating the walls of Toronto's Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects early into the run of this almost sold-out exhibition. And not only are Holst's feeding-frenzy paintings searingly red, they are also alarmingly grotesque, which makes it all the more difficult to explain their being snapped up so rapaciously by collectors. For some years now, the favored, indeed the almost obsessive, subject of the Edmonton-based painter's work has been little girls. Not the little girls traditionally composed of sugar and spice and all things nice, but, rather, demonic young things, often in starchy dresses and patent-leather shoes, who, for some reason, appear to be so inexplicably angry and potentially dangerous they are like prim little time-bombs ready to blow up in your face. There was a time when Holst painted babies, albeit red murderous babies. Now these overheated kids have grown, for the most part, into feverish adolescents. In Holst's painting called Tragedy, for example, a haughty, high-stepping, teenage majorette (in red, red uniform and with red, red shoes), instead of flourishing the inevitable baton, has delicately skewered herself in the chest with a decorative sword. How is it that teenage angst has so smoothly burgeoned into prepubescent hari-kari? In Sorceress, Holst's gawky red girl wears a tutu and ballet shoes, the potential grace of which is compromised by her overpoweringly prominent, punitive glasses. In Swan Song, the incendiary Holst nymphet, wearing a tutu and prominently featured underpants and a big fat necklace, is laid out to rest, diagonally across the dead-black canvas. Maybe she's asleep. She looks dead, though. And death makes a theatrical appearance in the diptych called Big Bad Wolf. In this odd, irreverently disturbing painting, a really furious red baby (in strangely grownup shoes), swathed in a Little-Red-Riding-Hood-like cape, has apparently just dispatched the wolf, which she has now strung up, so that its drooping bloodstained head is held aloft by a cord wrapped around the petulant girl's pinkie finger. What delicacy! What power! Why are Holst's girls so mad? And why are they so red? Okay, one question at a time. As far as their anger goes, Holst maintains that the works are in no way confessional. Or, one supposes, very autobiographical -- except for the fact that, as we all know, adolescence is a trial and maybe especially so for girls ("where frilly, flouncy tutu costumes, "reads her gallery statement, "protect like body armor and constrain like torture devices -- as the girls try desperately to attain their/society's ideal"). Still, not all young girls are shoe-horned into purgatorial tutus, into "obedience tutus" as a friend of mine calls them. And why are they all so red? Physically they are red because Holst paints her canvasses totally red before she does anything else. Then, she draws on the vast rednesses (she is a superb draftswoman) and begins to surround her now red figures with the blackness that will come to engulf them. That's what gives them that torrid glow that seems to come from inside them. Yes, but why red in the first place? I don't know. Holst once told me she has always felt there was "an innate, sexualized evil" in many children. Of course, she also told me how she worked in a meat-packing plant during university, eviscerating chickens. There was blood everywhere, she says. The she quit -- or at least quit stringing up chickens. Then, she tells me, "she moved into rendering." And she didn't mean rendering as in drawing things with a pencil. Maybe this explains it all? But I doubt it.
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