2004-11 Holloway, Evan Artforum.com Review 219 words
Figuration, a latent thread that has run through Los Angeles-based Holloway's rather formalist practice for several years, is pushed to the fore in “I Don't Exist,” his fifth hometown solo. Almost every sculpture in the exhibition combines multiple figures or faces, crudely rendered and physically inseparable from geometric armatures reminiscent of his earlier work. Equity, 2004, for example, is populated by twenty-seven small nude figurines, each skewered by thin metal rods, covered with brown paint, to form a three-layer latticework cube. Relationships between figure and pure form are bolstered by human interaction in Anti Hierarchy, 2004, an eleven-foot ring suspended from the ceiling whose interior Holloway has lined with over a hundred faces, in varying hues, cast from synthetic plaster. Staring straight ahead, each gaze meets its match in the center of the loop, and the work implies a parenthetical subtitle to the exhibition: “I Don't Exist (Except in Relation to Others)”. Even Cherubino, 2004, one of two fully abstract works on view, has its contingencies: its looping plaster form would disintegrate without the support of the steel base it rests on. Holloway has long encouraged an informal interdependency between object and viewer—usually by rewarding assiduous looking with surprising details—but these recent works encode that dependency in the sculptures themselves, and this show's tensions are perfectly poised.


Evan Holloway
"I Don't Exist," exhibition view
2004
Courtesy of the artist and marc foxx, Los Angeles