Essay for Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon. Sculptures, drawings, photographs and animations 2007-2017

18/10/17

Essay for Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

Victoria Rance: The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon

Sculptures, drawings, photographs and animations 2007-2017

Cello Factory, London

23-30 October 2017

A cast of black-and-white characters cavort across the screen: Rat Man, Long-Eared Bat Person and Loki, a mysterious shape-shifter and epitome of the Trickster. It is Fasnacht – a night of wearing masks and releasing one’s innermost repressed psychological realities. In Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, the Trickster is an anti-intellect figure, entertaining and mischievous, yet bearing a deeper wisdom about the world. Fasnacht invites the Trickster to come out and play, and, in Victoria Rance’s short film, come out and play he does.

Much of Rance’s work deals with archetypes and the wearing of masks, exploring what Jung describes as the compromise between what one likes to be and how one likes to appear – the persona as it stands in contrast to the personality. Her cast of recurring characters, besides Loki and his friends, includes Medusa, Perseus, Nuit (the goddess of the sky), and, most recently, the Night Horse and the Holy Baboon. Her Sculptures to Wear include caterpillars, a worm, and wasp spiders – a striking variety of arachnid that disguises itself as a more harmful species to evade a common predator.

Full essay and catalogue available here

Image:

Victoria Rance

The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon 

2017

installation

wood, steel, felt, wool, palm, plaster, polyester

H 354cm

Interview with Joey Holder at Wysing Arts Centre

13/10/16

Interview: Joey Holder

Joey Holder: Ophiux
Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge
25 September – 20 November 2016

Working with cutting edge science, artist Joey Holder (b1981) has created an immersive clinical environment, into which the visitor enters, wearing blue shoe covers, to be confronted with a larger-than-life MRI scanner, tanks containing dried out deep sea creatures, and X-ray light boxes, on which magnified bacteria and a curious skull are displayed. This is Ophiux, a speculative pharmaceutical company of the not-too-distant future, working with synthetic biology, to create new, genetically modified life.

During her 2015 residency at Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridge Holder was introduced to Dr Marco Galardini, a computational biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, and Dr Katrin Linse, senior biodiversity biologist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge. She has collaborated with them on her research to produce both the installation and the accompanying film, recently premiered at Deptford X, and soon to go on a national tour.  

Having studied sciences and art at A-level, Holder chose to follow an artistic career, studying first at Kingston University and later at Goldsmiths, where she obtained her MFA in 2010. Science has remained an enduring interest, however, as have curious and alien life forms, and – no doubt influenced by her time spent as a dive master in Turkey – the underwater world. This complex and thought-provoking exhibition brings together these diverse strands and makes a case for future such discourses between artists and scientists.

Holder showed Studio International around the installation and explained some of the science fact and science fiction involved.

Watch this interview here