James Holroyd

With his newest body of work, James Holroyd opens up his process to improvisation and chance, inspired by the Surrealists’ belief in orders underlying the appearance of reality that are, in Comte de Lautréamont’s words, “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” Like Max Ernst, Holroyd embraces how these irrational structures link “realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.” Added to this structural mélange, is the playful seriousness of Dada and Neo-expressionism.

Through representation, erasure and layering, Holroyd explores the relationship between abstract painting and figurative drawing and photography. This non-binary setting is populated by a motley assortment of seemingly nonsensical text, graphic figures, abstract mark making, and images of toys. As with his earlier work, which focused on figurative stuffed toys, Holroyd continues to be fascinated by the animate nature of things we assume to be inanimate. These elements construct a narrative world of private conversations.

This series, as in earlier works, explore alternative photographic processes and pinhole and primitive lens cameras, wrestling with the struggle to find meaning amidst the absurdities of contemporary life through play and wonder.

Flora Series:

Holroyd continues his exploration of the materiality of photographic imaging. It has facilitated both a move from pinhole to primitive lens photography and the exploration of the physical properties and creative potential of cyanotype on wood panel. Employing a single primitive lens made with a commercially available lens component, an artist built sliding box camera was used to shoot 4″x5″ film negatives. The lens and the camera, inspired by Alan Greene’s Primitive Photography: A Guide to Making Cameras, Lenses and Calotypes, produced images with optical properties similar to photographs from the 1840-1860’s. Because cyanotype is a contact printing process, the negative must be the same size as the desired print. The transition from a 4″x 5″ negative to a grid of larger internegatives necessitated a digital stage. Thus, digital inkjet internegatives are employed in the darkroom to produce the cyanotype positives where the cyanotype solution is painted directly onto the wood surface and exposed to UV light. These positives are then tiled together to create the larger final prints.

The scale of an art work affects the viewer’s perception of its subject. This shift in scale, together with the effects of the camera’s optics and cyanotype’s intense, deep Prussian blue color makes the representations of these flowers seem simultaneously familiar and foreign. The elegance of the flowers’ inherent design resonates with the random organic patterns of the wood grain on which the images are printed. Using alternative photographic processes for the capture and printing of these images creates a warm and unpredictable “hand-made” quality that allows the photographs in this exhibition to float in a limbo between past and present.

Holroyd has a Masters Degree in English literature.