Ithaca College

Exhibiting artist Desirée Holman will speak about her work on view at the Handwerker Gallery in the three-artist exhibition, BRIGHT SPECK, on Tuesday, March 28, 2017, at 6 p.m.. 

Artist Biography:

Desirée Holman is an artist based in Oakland, California. Her multi-sensory work positions groups of individuals and theatrical tools, like costumes or props, in settings that illuminate ideas of identity. The work attempts to occupy British anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of liminality, a transitional state of ritual wherein participants fully engaged in performance inhabit a series of new, hybrid identities. In this space, the artist’s work reveals a complex dialogue about truth and the experience of the ‘real’ world and is underpinned by a creative investigation into social equality through the use of character play.

Holman holds a Masters degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Earning critical acclaim for her work, Holman was awarded a San Francisco Modern Museum of Art SECA award in 2008 and in 2007 the Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue award. From 2016-2017, she will be returning to SFMOMA as a fellow in the Film & Performance Department with a new works commission. Solo exhibitions of her work include the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2009), Montreal’s SKOL (2016), Denver’s Black Cube Nomadic Museum (2015), and the Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX program (2011). International exhibitions of Holman’s work include the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Berlin’s Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Milan’s BnD, Montreal’s SKOL and Toronto’s YYZ. Reviews of Holman’s work appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Los Angeles Times, NY Arts, Artillery, San Francisco Chronicle and Artweek. Her work is represented by CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions in San Francisco and Aspect/Ratio in Chicago. 

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On View at the Handwerker:

Bright Speck: Desirée Holman, Anna Huff, Michelle Marie Murphy

Curated by Mara Baldwin

March 22–April 21, 2017

In 1972 the astronauts aboard the Apollo 17 likened the experience of looking back at the earth to seeing a blue marble hanging in the void.  The power of this vision is the awe-inspiring realization of both the complex fragility of our planet and our alienation from and connectedness to a vast, expanding universe. The artists in Bright Speck conflate the origins of life, knowledge, and the cosmos, each with uniquely textured responses. Michelle Murphy’s photographs and performances overlay the corporeal processes of pregnancy and birth with astronomical theory, drawing from her career as a photographer working for NASA and personal convictions for social reform. Desirée Holman’s long-term projects and culminating films present fantastical worlds of hybridity, where character play investigates and proposes social solutions our own world. Her culminating films, Reborn (2009), Heterotopias (2011), and Sophont (2015), present a narrative arc that builds towards an aesthetic iconography of harmonic convergence, and cosmic unity. Anna Huff’s work traces the intersections of the body, objects, and rituals by setting up improvised performances that encourage permeation of liminal space. Her primordial toddler-designed costumes and props included in Bright Speck will be activated by a performance featuring Ithaca College students on the evening of her artist talk on April 4. Utilizing critical optimism and creative inquiry, Murphy, Holman, and Huff travel between our world and the stars, catalyzing new possibilities of seeing, thinking, and wondering.

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All exhibitions and events at the Handwerker Gallery are free and open to the public.  The Handwerker Gallery is open Monday, Wednesday, & Friday from 10am-6pm; Thursdays from 10am-9pm; and Saturday & Sunday from 12pm-5pm. Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Mara Baldwin at mbaldwin@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3548. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.

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