Subtexting Reality: The Psychic Imprints of Loren Holland
Michele Elizabeth Lee || [ CURATORIAL STATEMENT ] use compass to view walls
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Curatorial statement
Women secure in their sensuality exist in surreal landscapes of intense color and quasi-distorted space. Their gaze is direct and guarded yet feigns a coquettishness that invites the viewer to join them in their fantasy world. Be forewarned, if enticed into this adult "Wonderland", one may tumble down Alice's rabbit hole and experience a parallel dimension wrought with symbolism, allegories, satire and stereotypes. Loren Holland's paintings, like Alice's journey through Wonderland or Dorothy's travails through Oz, coerce the viewer to recontextualize their comforts: identity, time, placement, and mythos. The two bodies of work in this gallery, "Native Strangers (...and Stranger Natives) and Black Magic Woman catapulted Loren into the art scene on both coasts. Native Strangers debuted in her first solo show at Anna Kustera Gallery in NYC, October 2006; and Black Magic Woman was an installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2007. The larger body, Native Strangers references the "idea of being a tourist within one's own culture, of geographic and cultural displacement, and the overt and subtle implications of what the artist describes as the subconscious discrimination of Afro Latinos within the larger Latino cultures."
My recent interview with Loren in her Long Beach studio revealed that she has been reading and studying the Rider Waite tarot cards for 4 years. She also speaks five languages, six if you count tarot symbology and numerology. When I sat down to write this statement, I looked at her work once again, and saw something else that expands the discourse on this young painter's pathos: Holland tarot cards. Queen of Cups. The Two Lovers. The Empress. The Moon. These cards are intricately detailed psychic imprints that offer subliminal messages and portend advisory omens. At the end of our interview, Loren shared she wanted to eventually integrate tarot cards into her work. I say she's creating her own and already doing it! In the words of Anais Nin, "Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."
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Women secure in their sensuality exist in surreal landscapes of intense color and quasi-distorted space. Their gaze is direct and guarded yet feigns a coquettishness that invites the viewer to join them in their fantasy world. Be forewarned, if enticed into this adult "Wonderland", one may tumble down Alice's rabbit hole and experience a parallel dimension wrought with symbolism, allegories, satire and stereotypes. Loren Holland's paintings, like Alice's journey through Wonderland or Dorothy's travails through Oz, coerce the viewer to recontextualize their comforts: identity, time, placement, and mythos. The two bodies of work in this gallery, "Native Strangers (...and Stranger Natives) and Black Magic Woman catapulted Loren into the art scene on both coasts. Native Strangers debuted in her first solo show at Anna Kustera Gallery in NYC, October 2006; and Black Magic Woman was an installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2007. The larger body, Native Strangers references the "idea of being a tourist within one's own culture, of geographic and cultural displacement, and the overt and subtle implications of what the artist describes as the subconscious discrimination of Afro Latinos within the larger Latino cultures."
My recent interview with Loren in her Long Beach studio revealed that she has been reading and studying the Rider Waite tarot cards for 4 years. She also speaks five languages, six if you count tarot symbology and numerology. When I sat down to write this statement, I looked at her work once again, and saw something else that expands the discourse on this young painter's pathos: Holland tarot cards. Queen of Cups. The Two Lovers. The Empress. The Moon. These cards are intricately detailed psychic imprints that offer subliminal messages and portend advisory omens. At the end of our interview, Loren shared she wanted to eventually integrate tarot cards into her work. I say she's creating her own and already doing it! In the words of Anais Nin, "Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."
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