What do you find when you peel back a gallery wall? This was a driving question for Minnesota artist James Holmberg and he needed to find the answer. In his most recent work, featured in the MAEP exhibition “Forever,” Holmberg works with architectural structures, like those in the gallery wall, zeroing in on commonplace objects that recall memories or past experiences. By opening the gallery wall and recovering what lies behind, he shows how transition and transparency can inform the museum space and human experience.
Holmberg’s site-specific installation, Inside, looms large, occupying the west wall of the gallery. Extracting a massive 8-by-17 foot section of the MIA’s wall, he exposed the hidden infrastructure of metal studs and concrete column that support the building. He cut through two inches of sheet rock and plywood backing to unveil what has not been seen since the Target Wing was built in 2006. Rather than throw out the removed materials, Holmberg repurposed it and built a site-specific sculpture on the gallery floor. He deliberately worked the raw plywood, sheetrock, and layers of paint into a complex composition using supportive clamps. He placed the sculpture, Residue, in front of the gaping absence in the wall to showcase the transformation of these materials. Residue reminds us that nothing can be restored to its original state. As Holmberg notes, “Nothing is lost or created, but rather transformed. Forever.” What he invents anew from these objects remains informed by their previous state in the wall. Through the surgical removal of the wall’s materials and subsequent rearrangement, Holmberg’s process imitates symbolic attempts to recover what has been taken apart in life.
James Holmberg, Descend, oil paint and mirror, 2014
Holmberg takes his artistic questions a step further in smaller works created using traditional oil paint and building materials, including masking tape, Plexiglas, screws, plastic, and spray paint. The amalgamation of materials is another way for Holmberg to explore and share his additive and subtractive processes, dappling in themes of stability and fragility.
The ethereal brushstrokes marking the surface of the two dimensional oil paintings Descend and Ascension draw on techniques of abstract composition Holmberg explored in his earlier work. In Descend, the smooth, glazed surface of yellow and white oil paint flows to the gallery floor. Holmberg built up the surface with layers of paint and then scraped a large swath of paint in a vertical stroke down the canvas. This gesture interrupts the seamless transition of color from light to dark. The paint pools onto a mirror placed below the canvas, causing energetic shadows and prisms of light to bounce onto the wall. Imbuing the exhibition with light and reflectivity, our eyes follow the gradation of color downwards to the mirror where we meet our own reflection. Descend visually responds to both quotidian and deeply personal states of transition such as the passage of day to night or life to death. Holmberg comments that the “shadows and perspective as well as […] spaces of color and light, invite feelings of liberation, perhaps emptiness, sometimes a twinge of apprehension.”
James Holmberg, Fixed, metal tape, plastic, and wood, 2013
In Fixed, Holmberg begins with a wooden frame. But instead of stretching canvas across it, he covers the frame with plastic. Using a razor blade, he made long straight cuts into the transparent surface. Strips of reflective, silver duct-tape overlap and intercept across the plastic to mend these incisions. Fixed investigates sights of real and symbolic recovery by capturing the process of ripping and then mending plastic back together. The taped surface appears whole again, but the duct-tape Band-Aids barely cover the textured scar tissue that records the long process of healing. Fixed illustrates how our new selves will always bear traces of our past.
James Holmberg, Cut, plastic, spray paint, and wood, 2013.
In a similar piece titled Cut, Holmberg’s incisions have not been repaired. He slices through a layer of plastic secured taut to the wooden frame to expose the gallery wall. Imprints of spray-painted suture lines cut across the drooping plastic and leave faint smudges. By engaging in the physical process of disclosure and uncovering what hides even underneath the translucent coat of plastic, Holmberg simultaneously recalls the personal dimensions of undoing inherent in human experience.
“Forever” is a fascinating exhibition that discloses the diverse dimensions of human experience. The materials Holmberg engages with each carry a story that leaves us with semblances of both completeness and fragmentation. Holmberg notes how it is critical to see the work in its totality—as the fragmentary components building each artwork complement and contrast one another.
There are incredible details to discover, like the shadows scampering across the gallery walls and the residual pencil marks on the concrete slab written by a construction worker. Look closely at the traces of spray paint, drill holes, pencil marks, and shoe tread marks on Residue. What may appear as purely constructive and mechanical quickly dissolves into a investigation of self and the associative power of memory. Foregrounding the intersections between human experience and art, Holmberg offers us a field to transcend our timeless and internal experiences.