Barbara Holmes
Barbara Holmes’ Hollow-Core speaks of redemption. Materially, she redeems these doors from obsolescence in a landfill. She transforms them – so redolent of the lonely, badly built interiors, homes, banks, hospitals they once occupied – into a new material she uses to construct her pieces. With valueless materials like these, one is tempted to make art that further numbs, draws us deeper into depressed disembodiment. Instead, Holmes is generous. She takes the joyless interiors of a stifled, prefabricated existence and transforms them into beautiful cityscapes that fire the imagination.
In a time devastated by irony, she transcends kitsch and cynicism by building haunting renditions of the constructed spaces that have limited our shared consciousness. Miniature quonset huts, nuclear reactors, indiscriminant office buildings, uncanny unnamable structures of our childhood and present. As we move through these scapes, towering over them, we are liberated, free to reinvent ourselves on a human scale far greater than that of this spiritual and physical architecture.
At the same time, Holmes honors the precision of these structures reducing them to immaculate, small, consumable abstractions. We are encouraged to keep what is beautiful from this strange zeitgeist and escape that which would imprison us and in this gesture we may find the greatest redemption of all.
- T. Vogler
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