Opening Reception: December 2nd, 2020, 2-8 pm
Gallery Location: 195 Chrystie Street, New York, NY 10002
Hours: Monday – Friday, 10 am–6 pm, Saturday noon–6 pm and by appointment
Contact Info: saraht@voltzclarke.com, 917.292.6921, voltzclarke.com
Voltz Clarke Gallery is pleased to present Body Language by Holland Cunningham. The exhibition will be on view from December 2nd through December 31st, 2020.
“Holland Cunningham uses various materials from oil paint to water-based media, photography and animation. Her depictions are rooted in collected memories captured in old photographs she finds and collects. The figures in Cunningham’s paintings are reconceived, reactivated and given a new perspective by the artist. The viewer of her works becomes an active participant filling in the gaps of the imagined narrative. The women Cunningham depicts are present, but enigmatic, assured in their actions, but lost somewhere in distant time. They require our attention and invite us to enter their world, linger there and imagine what they are thinking or who they might be.”
~Natasha Schlesinger, curator and founder of ArtMuse
Cunningham is an avid collector of discarded photography that she sees not as images frozen in time, but as something that is still happening.
The found photography and slides that inspire her become the starting point for her figurative oil paintings. Cunningham is interested in taking the memories of others found in the print details of photographs and creating new associations through her own ideas and imagination. The individual works Cunningham makes are fragments of a narrative that she continues to change and develop as she adds new pieces. In essence, she intends to create a new story formed from the lives and moments of others. Holland Cunningham is a spectator as well as the protagonist and player in the scene or moment captured.
Holland B. Cunningham was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1967 and educated at the University of Virginia where she studied art history and studio art. She continued her studies at the Art Students League and National Academy of Art and Design. She was a resident at the Bau Institute in Puglia, Italy the summer of 2012. She currently resides and works in New York City.