Holly King

I work from models, miniature sets built in my workshop, powerfully illuminated by photo lights and then photographed. The landscape is a recurring theme in my work, each suite exploring this in a new context. I am interested in the tension between artifice and illusion generated. These large format works allow the viewer to imagine it actually enters these places invented. They are designed to appeal to memories of real landscapes and draw on other sources, such as film or various historical and literary art reference, and is decoded differently by each viewer, which interprets it from his own experience landscape. Following Coming into View comes from the idea of landscape as intimate portrait. The oval shape refers to photographic portraits where the image of a face or a body is lovingly preserved and cherished in the privacy of the oval. These large photographs wrap around the viewer metaphorically and offer an intimate vision of perfect landscapes, gorgeous, compact compositions gripped by the oval.In other works, like Beauty, Slope and Lush (2002-2004), I examine the interaction between history and landscape photographed the painted landscape. In these oval photographs, miniature and complexity of detail recalling Constable oppose the grandiose immensity of the sublime. The links between the intimate and the infinite there intertwine accomplices. Some recent works of more The Transcendent Sublime are splashed on textured watercolor paper. This printing technique increases the intensity of the landscape made and painted, which then refers strongly to painters like Caspar Hauser Friedrich and JW Turner. These medium format photographs invite a closer examination. Midnight Revealed and Verdigris Suspended show a profusion of intertwined branches that defy the spatial orientation of the viewer, with their roots pointing to the sky, which is taken at first for trees. My work includes lots of reversals: photographs resembling paintings, painted surfaces resembling skies, objects and deceptive appearances. The water and the sky constantly changing with their array of cloud formations, colors, movements, create moods and atmospheres.Specular regions animate the sky and symbolize emotions and bring together ideas, haunting images that the viewer can identify with and where it can penetrate through his imagination.

Curriculum Vitae