Holly Chang

Carrying / Holding / Transporting II for Proof 29 (2023)
Gallery 44

Curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis

Holly Chang
Christina Oyawale
Neeko Paluzzi

In Proof 29, artists Holly Chang, Christina Oyawale and Neeko Paluzzi present installations that place their photographic practices within expanded spatial and material contexts, as their work moves from intimate specificity into the sphere of collective meaning-making. These openings correlate also to the artists’ shared investment in the open-ended, the non-linear and the indeterminate.

Holly Chang shares photographs taken during two successive residencies: first in Banff, Alberta and then across the continent on Quirpon Island, Newfoundland. These periods of contemplation came in the recent wake of
abrupt and traumatic ruptures in the artist’s life. Chang’s relationship to her mixed-race white and Chinese-Jamaican identity, already fraught, was further complicated by loss and familial estrangement. Through the slowness and uncertainty of the analog film process, Chang sought to ask: What possibilities might emerge from this discomfort, working with as well as through it? Foregoing the meticulous intentionality of research-creation she often favours, Chang adopted an intuitive, improvisational approach—her photography guided by the external cues of these two locations and the contours of the emotional landscapes she simultaneously traversed.

Arranged here in modular earth-magnet compositions, Chang’s observations of the two distinct environments contrast and merge. Looming mountains, slick green algae, root systems, crags coated with crustose lichen evidence of impossibly slow transformation. A still life tableau arranged on a laminated map and an open botanical field guide suggests the desire to index experience through an assortment of tiny gathered treasures—urchin shells, heaps of sea glass shards, a gull feather. Grief and uncertainty feel most palpable in a striking black and white image of a tide pool, its glass-smooth surface reflecting the infinite blankness of an overcast sky. Is this a portal, or a void?

I would like to acknowledge funding support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario for their support.

https://www.gallery44.org/exhibitions/proof-29