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DANA HOLST |
Essays & Reviews |
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Dana
Holst's unholy terrors
The Globe
and Mail Dana Holst's exhibition at the Angell Gallery is called Wrestle, an initially puzzling title for a show made up of the artist's newest collection of hotly coloured paintings of children. You don't have to spend much time with these obnoxious, if consummately well-crafted moppets, however, before Holst has you wrestling with some troubling ideas. Most of the kiddos are girls. And none of them appear to have sustained any prolonged engagement with sugar 'n' spice and all things nice. On the contrary, Holst's volcanic baby vixens, usually isolated on rich, uninflected monotonal grounds, grimace out at the viewer like feral animals, their carnivorous, Bride-of-Chucky stares searing into whatever remains of your nursery-rhyme benignity regarding children. Sometimes Holst further underscores the isolation of her little unholy terrors by putting them in restraining devices: Hanging Boy, for example, dangles in a Jolly Jumper, a haunted stare the only reaction to his displacement. In the riotously hued Girl on Wheels, one of the finest of the new paintings, a sullen, tousle-haired kid in a heavily pigmented blue dress stands forlornly in her wheeled walker (bright yellow walker, bright red legs), an incarnation of coiled malevolence whose closest ancestor is one of Francis Bacon's screaming popes in a cage. Occasionally, two figures occupy the same painting, as in Holst's splendid Red Cat Fight. This inevitably generates discord, not bonding (the standing figure in Red Cat Fight is so distraught that her pearly baby incisors have become nascent fangs). The rage of Holst's babies is made manifest in the artist's strange and original use of red: It's as if her figures were entirely made of it, each a ruddy coalescence of blood and sinew and rage. This makes for a kind of raw, internal heat in each figure, over which their brightly painted clothing (in burning blue, molten red, stinging yellow) is applied like a salve.
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