Hi folks,

 

Happy Saturday! I’ve got a fun Q&A with painter Holly Fedida for you this dispatch. Holly opened her first-ever solo show at Hunt Gallery last night; and the Concordia grad will also embark on an Annandale Artist Residency later this year.

 

I was fortunate enough to spend some time in Holly’s studio recently, where I was able to experience the potency of her newest works more intimately. I’m curious about how I’ll react to seeing them in a gallery context when I visit the show; and the response – mine, and everyone else's – is actually the seed of inspiration for Holly’s exhibition, Looker. By distorting details to create an almost intoxicating effect of uncertainty and disruption in her soulful renderings of bountiful bouquets, mixing bowls, and water fountains, Holly’s asking her audience to try and absorb the scene they’ve crept into. She’s also posing the question: What does it really mean to look at something?

 

Still life work, we discussed, has historically had a lame rap in the art world. In her world, however, a poetic force pervades her still life scenes. Rainbows swirl around kitchenware, halo-ish orbs ensconce the pulls on an otherwise unremarkable chest of drawers; here, magic mingles with the mundane through Impressionistic gestures and psychedelic flourishes. One comment during our conversation stuck out to me: Holly noted that still life painting is often thought of as a way for artists to have demonstrated their painterly prowess – and the painstaking attention to detail present in a piece by Rachel Ruysch, for example, is indeed noteworthy. What I like about Holly’s approach, though, is the intentionally hazy, dream-like ambiguity of her articulations, which really gives the uncanniness of her work its impact. 

AN INTERVIEW WITH HOLLY FEDIDA

Holly Fedida, A Fountain, 2024. Oil on canvas (54 x 84 inches). Photography by LF Documentation.

 

For her first solo show, Looker, Holly Fedida works in two different scales – one large, one much smaller, lending an air of illusion to the experience of seeing familiar objects in still life settings. But its the flickers of light and dashes of rainbow that truly infuse these works with sparks of wonder. I talked to Holly about why she loves stuff, and how it inspires her.

 

 

I grew up in a pretty small, rural area. We would go to museums on school trips, but I wouldn’t say I was specifically inspired by them. I made a lot of things – sewing and more craft-oriented projects. I think that in smaller towns there’s lots of room for eccentricity, so you’ll find people who have weird things they make. Like, there’s always that person who has a garage full of sculptures, but they might not define themselves as an artist.  

 

I think that anyone who grows up outside of an urban centre has a bit of an inclination to have to make something happen for themselves because they have less access. For example, I moved to Montréal for my undergrad, and I would be so jealous hearing about the cultural experiences my peers had by virtue of living in the city. Over time I’ve realized that by not having that access, I’ve been forced to go out and make the images I want for myself. It’s not like I didn’t have the internet at my disposal and that kind of thing growing up, but the situation motivated me to conjure up the world I wanted to see.

 

 

I really love stuff. I love objects. I’m an accumulator, which I think is a kinder word than hoarder. I feel very physically drawn to things.

 

 

I would say yes – I’ve always liked having little rocks and tchotchkes to surround myself with. A lot of my work comes from this love of objects and the fact that I feel like they have an intrinsic energy or aura or agency or magic; you could describe it a lot of different ways.

 

When I see and interact with objects, this is how I view them – as having a kind of glow or pulsing quality; something magical about them. It’s a physical reaction, like an intense response, and my paintings come from my desire to share that way of seeing objects with other people.

 

I have come to understand that not everyone feels this way about objects, especially mundane stuff; but in these painted forms, the viewer has no choice but to see the rainbow shooting out from a glass or a glowing orb around a chest of drawers. It forces them to reckon with objects as a magical thing, or as having a kind of presence.

Holly Fedida, Flower Vase for Georgia, 2024. Oil on canvas (54 x 84 inches). Photography by LF Documentation.

 

It’s a mix. A lot of the objects are painted to be purposefully ambiguous – they could be any glass or mixing bowl, for instance. They’re not really unique; I think of them in terms of language, like they’re stand-ins in for something. A specific object that I’m thinking about when I’m working is less important than the emotion or experience of seeing it; it’s like taking all the branded logos off of something and that’s what you’re left with.

 

 

I think it would. Making paintings of objects means you have to contend with other people’s experience with objects. And these experiences are rooted in memory. Often when people look at my paintings, they ask, “Oh was this your grandmother’s blanket?” or other personal things. And that’s fair – because people have such strong memory attachments to objects, it’s why they’re drawn to my work, and why they’re drawn to objects in general.

 

In the work, I’m much more excited about the object as an entity with its own kind of power – like, if you could remove the memory attachment, there’s still something interesting about the object without it being a memory holder. I don’t think it would serve the paintings well to have these associations either. 

Holly Fedida, Scrying Orb, 2024. Oil on canvas (54 x 84 inches). Photography by LF Documentation.

 

The ones in the front room are all the same height – seven feet tall. That’s just the right size so they can be carried through the door. I wanted there be a visual link between these paintings.

 

I was thinking about the tradition of still life painting and the tropes we all know, like flowers and tabletop scenes. In art history, still life painting in the Western canon is lowly. But it gets picked up throughout time as a way for painters to show off their chops. So I was thinking about the genre, and what it could mean if the objects were given a different kind of agency; and what it means to paint a still life differently. There’s still a tension there in terms of how much agency you ultimately give to something you’re painting. I’m interested in the question of, so you’re painting this thing – what does it mean to describe it? Are you taking something away from it? Can you do it justice? I was trying to stick closely to the still life genre, but these pieces do move on from it.

 

I’ve never painted this big before, so I was excited to think about the composition. They’re these huge paintings with forms that press up against the edges of the frame. The compositions are slightly “wrong”, like they make you a bit seasick or something. And I was thinking about possible stages, or sets, for these paintings to play out on.

 

 

I’ve never had a studio this big, and I’ve never had a solo show before. I figured it was my chance!

 

Scale, whether we like it or not, forces people to contend with a subject matter more. The smaller paintings in the show feel more intimate, and your viewing relationship is more personal. For the larger ones, it’s physically hard to look at them each all at once – I like the discomfort that happens because of that. There are decisions in the works that are awkward, and this scale creates more potential for a physical response.

 

 

This sound cheesy but it’s honest: I hope people take time to look at the paintings and think about what it means to look at something. What does the experience of looking feel like?

 

A trio of inviting exhibitions on my radar right now.

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