EVAN HOLLOWAY

Holloway pursues the labyrinthine paths of sculpture’s long history, producing worksthat reflect an altogether contemporary state of mind while drawing liberally frommodernist, ancient, esoteric, and popular lineages. This polymathic sensibility hasallowed him to produce works that are unmistakably his own, both in terms of conceptand execution. Forgoing the kind of industrialised processes that many artists would useto produce similarly ambitious forms, Holloway works hands-on, at 1:1 scale, creatingobjects that are attuned in equal measure to internal weather patterns of intuition andabstraction, collective cultural phenomena, and a sense of connection with a wide rangeof audiences.

In Cobbler, Holloway presents new works in which he incorporates sculptures ofdresses and shoes he has made himself, as well as elements that slyly appropriate themechanics of retail display. As a whole, the show wears the garb of a store as kind offormal drag, one in which fashion and commercialism are spiked with mind-expandingdoses of color, geometry, and material experimentation. As looking becomes conflatedwith browsing and buying, interaction with art becomes more personalized, more deeplycaught up in personal modes of relating that include physical desire and affiliation with apreferred aesthetic. Holloway draws paradoxical inspiration from the increasinglycommon cross-pollination between art and fashion, looking for cues not only from theworld of haute couture, but from the ways in which designers borrow—and take—fromartists.

The inclusion of objects based on garments also underscores the ways in whichHolloway’s work emerges from—and maintains dialogue with—the size and proportionsof the individual human body. Even the largest sculptures on view in Cobbler make thisconnection clear. Display with Mirror (2024), for instance, features a spiraling conicalform whose steel structure is covered with dyed canvas panels. A circular mirror hasbeen installed at the wide end of the cone, which touches the floor, bringing thepotential presence of the viewer’s image into the work’s visual orbit. Each detail of thesculpture is a testament to physical contact. The canvas panels are affixed to the work’sframe with small lengths of copper wire, suggesting that close-up looking has anequivalent in the proximity of touch. The garment-like forms that hang at its centre meanwhile, function as abstract collections of hues, textures, and shapes in addition toobjects that might, in another context, be handled or worn.

Mystical or numerical systems have often supplied Holloway with principles that guidethe elaboration of his work. In Cobbler he mines the aesthetic possibilities of retaildisplay in an analogous fashion, a shift that allows him to question the perceivedstandalone masculinity of sculpture specifically and of modernist formalism moregenerally. Floor-based, medium-scale sculptures featuring objects that resemble shoes,for example, provocatively flirt with boutique-oriented functionality even as they demandto be read as subtly constructed compositions in volumetric space. The steelcomponents of these works, which rest on the floor, resemble linear drawings in threedimensions. Their loops, angles, and twisting, ladder-like shapes feel both organic andarchitectural, negotiating an indeterminate space between expressivity and support.Highly complex forms masquerading as bases, they hold painted wood boards cut intoirregular shapes that in turn provide platforms for Holloway’s inventive, humorous, andheterogeneous takes on footwear.

Each shoe sculpture is an assemblage produced from an array of materials—amongthem license plates, cut segments of bicycle chains, appliance switches, fabric, andwood—whose familiarity is further accentuated by the surprise of their combination. Likethose that include fabric, these works also indicate the absence of a body that theynonetheless seem to conjure in thin air. In this respect, the works perform a kind ofhumble magic, even as they continuously focus here-and-now attention on the basiccomponents of which they are made and demonstrate how informality can co-exist withprecision and careful workmanship. Wall-based sculptures that feature the shoes,meanwhile, emphasise their dual functionality as representational forms thatnonetheless prompt non-objective readings. The shoes’ stylistic variety is matched hereby thick, many-faceted wood supports that jut out from the wall. Though the format ofthese works brings them into conversation with painting, the artist has constructed themso that they stubbornly retain their thing-ness along with a measure of otherworldlycuriosity.

Throughout Cobbler, Holloway shows how the everyday tactility of things near-at-handcontains the potential to experiences that border on the mystical. To make the works onpaper whose vertiginous swarms of lines and colors provide counterpoints to thesculptures, he affixes sheets of paper to a turntable, marking them with ink as they areintermittently rotated. The use of this automatic procedure introduces both freedom ofmovement and freedom of intention, evoking the patterns—and patterned chaos—thatexist at every level of nature. Folds in the paper, as well as spots where the surface hasbeen worn by repetitive marking, serve as reminders that material processes gave riseto these images and that things are built up in seemingly flat spaces as well asvolumetric ones, not to mention the immaterial spaces of the mind where concepts andvisions originate and fade from sight in ultimately inexplicable ways.

As its title suggests, Cobbler is about all kinds of making, and about the archetypalforces that connect the craftsperson’s labor to the universe-shaping mechanisms thatbring the world into being. For Holloway, encounters with objects—whether in storesand workshops, galleries and museums, or the annals and dreams of civilizations past,present, and future—are also encounters with distant origins, far-off potentials, andmysteries at the heart of what is most familiar.

Press release courtesy David Kordansky Gallery