CLAREMONT, CA.-The Pomona College Museum of Art opened the exhibit Project Series 35: Evan Holloway through May 17. Evan Holloway will present a new installation based on his long-term investigations into the history and theory of modernist sculpture. Holloway’s practice—including sculptures, drawings, sound works, and videos—is as diverse as his personal studies, topics of research, material choices, and the objects themselves. Grounded in conceptual art, art history, pop culture, funk assemblage, and music, Holloway’s works—from the abstract to the figurative—are fabricated from materials such as steel, plaster, rope, wood, and often include found objects like batteries, furniture, musical instruments, etc. Holloway also considers the relationship between his objects, the meanings of those objects, the viewer’s body, the viewer’s perceptions, and the social environment and the physical spaces surrounding these elements. Holloway’s work ultimately succeeds because it combines a personal vision of the world today and human experience in it, with formal and creative innovations that map sculptural history.
Evan Holloway makes playful use of materials to arrive at sculpture in which formal and political interests intertwine and establish a balance between a critique of modernist conventions and a carefully calibrated satirical social commentary. Holloway's sculptures combine the abstract and linear with the figurative. Inspired by music and colour theory, economics and mathematics, Holloway creates distinctive, often elegant and sometimes strange forms that constantly make reference to the history of 20th century sculpture. His sculptures are often suspended from the ceiling, hovering like large mobiles above the gallery floor and, as in Untitled 2003, incorporate an assemblage of elongated faces modeled in hobby plaster and intricately painted in a variety of doleful expressions, a characteristic of his work. These figurative elements are attached to the formal, abstract, structures that make up the other portion of the sculpture. In Capital 2005, nude male figures replace the faces in Untitled 2003 as the figurative elements placed in juxtaposition with the linear structure. Compared to the faces, the figures featured in Capital are less individualized; they are submissively and comically posed on their backs and fronts and attached to each other by a network of bent metal rods. Each of the little figures is connected to the rods at its mouth and anus, and their gridded home is roughly coated with brown paint resembling fecal matter. Holloway’s sculpture poses formal questions about scale, colour, line, shape and symmetry while at the same time making references to popular culture, historical narratives and social ideologies.
