SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
Optimists remind us of the silver lining inside every cloud, the cliché of unanticipated good fortune that somehow we, who are trapped in our gloom, cannot see. Rebecca Holland capitalizes on the alchemical and metaphorical properties of silver and literally applies countless sheets of silver leaf to the enormous concrete ceiling in her project Current. In the past, Holland’s practice has depended on the repetition of simple gestures and the shifts that occur when the mundane is rendered otherworldly by means of perceptual interventions. In one early work, the artist filled a gallery with amassed filaments of dental floss, linear networks collecting light and defining space.
For her site-specific installation at ArtPace, Holland begins with an architectural given, the ceiling, an element that is usually ignored by contemporary architects but which centuries earlier in Baroque palaces was decorated lavishly to certify the celestial continuation of earthly endeavors. Holland transforms the entire room by attending to this often overlooked site. She illuminates it twice, first by painstakingly applying more than eight thousand five-by-five-inch sheets of silver leaf and then by altering the existing light fixtures. Adding to the number of simple glass globes already in place, Holland lowers them to cast more light onto what has now been annexed as her work, the ceiling’s surface. Dramatically activating our perception of this environment with this conceptually economic move, Holland labored for weeks pressing each thin sheet into place with her hands. Like a laminate, apparently superficial, but fused with its support, the pattern of squares is always visible as a grid and registers as a geometric overlay.
Suggesting painting’s thin skin or glazing applied to ceramics, Current can also be read as the thinnest possible sculptural addition, a fine layer of metal. Again referencing the stucco and gilt ceilings of art history but mutated to cast a cool mechanical aura, the work is grounded in reality and aspires to the sublime. Silver is not so distant from aluminum paint, functional and appropriate for such a site, but in Holland’s subtle choice of an improbable luxury metal, she exploits all the symbolic characteristics of her material and its equally rich perceptual qualities. Nearly transparent, silver’s sheen differs from the dull cast of aluminum. During the day it looks almost white and neutral; at night it shimmers and becomes reflective. The suspended light fixtures can be read as stars or planets mirrored against the shining ground, a homemade planetarium for viewers who search for clues or constellations in starry skies. A utilitarian red exit sign is also mirrored to become a crimson burn. As if in a dream, viewers gaze up, choreographed to move on a stage where ceiling and ground have been reversed.
Current, 2000. Silver leaf on ceiling. 48 × 29 × 16 ft. Detail
Neither painting nor sculpture, the work has a forceful presence. A sense of a private act made public occurs as the viewer’s response becomes part of a performative environment. If the painting metaphor holds, then the audience is obliged to become connoisseurs watching for adjustments in pentimento and gesture; legible details of facture become information and emotional traces magnified on the ceiling. The unevenly textured surface suggests another narrative in which a patch resembles a scar; rough and pocked areas are adjacent to and contrast with smooth passages. Evidence of the original construction, architectural repairs, and mechanical adjustments all become intentional and illuminated; lined with silver, they can be rediscovered as compositional events. Holland’s patient labor recognizes this earlier work, repeats each movement, and renders it visible again. Paradoxically, by covering these traces, her practice aestheticizes and recovers those of her unknown predecessors, and merges them with theirs.
The strategy of concealing in order to reveal was explored by Conceptual artists of the 1970s, when they used camouflage techniques to underline the normally invisible institutional infrastructure that brought a work of art to fruition. A California contingent experimented with the perceptual qualities of light and its effects to extend the visual into the experiential and psychological. Holland absorbs and blurs the boundaries of these approaches, synthesizing both in what could be called a kind of magic Minimalism. She disorients us in this space by overturning the conventions of our viewing experience. Her decisions become charged at the edges of the room, where she forces herself to determine the limits of her work. Other choices—to cover mechanical tubing and plumbing—introduce volumetric disruption and idiosyncratic incident to the flat expanse. This Duchampian transfer from everyday instrumentality to aesthetic contemplation, like the best installations, seems perfectly natural albeit surreally elegant. In another related site—a second-floor window whose rectangular glass panes form a larger square grid—Holland has produced a small-scale counterpoint to her ambitious first-floor project. An almost inevitable and ingenious gesture, the artist located a central windowpane and covered it with silver leaf. For all its quiet, almost a “where’s the art?” first impression, Holland’s intervention is deeply thoughtful, as time-consuming for the viewer as for the artist.
Current
Toward the conclusion of her task, Holland began to line the southern face of the transverse beam supporting the gallery. There she discovered the painted-over letters, “Repairing & Painting,” naming the original function of the former automobile showroom and seeming eponymously to label Holland’s restorative installation so that it appears disconcertingly predetermined. Holland relies on a contemporary art world’s nostalgia for individual handiwork and offers her intimate consideration of each inch of a preexisting expanse of board-formed concrete. Mapping a grid of small squares onto a rough ceiling, she allows for recollection and shifts our understanding from past to present, from the mechanical to the aesthetic, in a fantasy where lining the ceiling of an automobile shop with a silver skin can never be permanent. The silver surface will soon be painted over for future exhibitions; like the work of its predecessors, Current exists as memory.
Judith Russi Kirshner
Current. Detail
Untitled, 2000. Silver leaf on glass. 74 × 74 in.
