Holly King brings her magic to the new building

By Robert Winters

Artist-photographer Holly King’s world is a magical one in which the viewer steps out of time and space for a moment to imagine a landscape of beauty that almost seems to have come out of a dream.

It’s a world of light that glows with a spirit of mystery that infuses the landscape. But wait a minute, what exactly are we looking at? Is this a painting? Some hyper-real computer-generated image?

The reality behind Holly’s magic is that she creates elaborate miniature sets at her Eastern Townships studio, meticulously photographs them with a special camera using a larger than normal size negative and then supervises the production of a large-scale print.

“People bring their own imagination and memories” to her landscapes, Holly said in an interview. By printing the images so large, viewers “are almost able to step into these worlds.”

One of her large photos has been chosen for a mural in Concordia’s new Fine Arts-Engineering complex, which is nearing completion at the corner of Guy and Ste. Catherine Sts.

Holly’s piece, which will be at the entrance to the building on the métro level, was chosen after a competition organized by the Concordia University Part-Time Faculty Association (CUPFA).

She has been a part-time instructor in the Studio Arts department for 20 years, teaching painting and drawing as well as an ARTX course she helped develop that deals with visual language as content.

Holly has had 40 solo shows and has participated in about 60 group exhibitions. She has work in several museum collections, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, which organized a touring show of her work in 1998. Her work is also in several corporate collections, including those of Air Canada and London Life.

She was one of only three Canadian artists with a piece in the Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences show at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2000-01, an international exhibition that went on to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Familiar

Holly’s landscapes can seem very familiar. She said a few people told her at one show, “I’m from that area, I know it very well.” But she doesn’t intend for the illusion to be complete; she wants the viewer to be aware that the landscape is artificial, thus pitting “believability vs. artifice, and fabrication vs. illusion.”

Holly, who takes about a month to make each new landscape, doesn’t allow her sets to be photographed or exhibited. She starts with a drawing, inspired by various influences, including films, literary texts and references to art history. Then she paints her sky and makes trees out of clay, adding other materials such as tissue paper, plaster, wood and plastic.

The sets are quite simple. “It’s like going backstage at the theatre,” Holly said. “The actual objects are very humble. Photographing the sets transforms them.”

The reference to performance and theatre is important for understanding the evolution of Holly King’s work from her days as one of the pioneers in performance art in Quebec. She studied studio arts, first in Quebec City, at Université Laval, then at York University, where she did her master’s degree.

Her years as a performance artist included a show at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain when she was in her early 20s. She incorporated symbols inspired by psychology and Carl Jung’s work.

One performance that toured several cities featured Holly in a cage with a black wooden frame. She wore a two-sided costume, with a peacock on one side and “the beast” on the other, turning quickly from one character to the other as she paced about the cage.

Staged performances

She later created staged performances for the camera in a set she created, often adding architectural elements. Finally, she tired of using the human form and focused on photographing the landscapes she created. “I wanted viewers to feel they could step into this world I was creating rather than watch somebody else in that world,” she said.

This emphasis on stimulating the imagination of the viewer is particularly fitting for the mural photo Holly is creating for the university’s new building, where it will help link the worlds of the university and the city beyond its gates.

The Concordia piece, which is 14 feet high by 12 feet wide, is titled Seascape and the Sublime. It depicts a luminous sky in colours of turquoise and deep blue reflected into a sea that gently swirls and eddies. In the foreground is a large flat-topped landmass that invites the viewer to contemplate the seascape beyond.