Holly DeGrote
How do we recognize other people? Who are they and how are they represented to us? Through my artwork, I am questioning
how it is that another person is defined for me and through me. When interacting with another, we either recognize them as a person,
as someone with feelings and experiences that we can connect with, or we see them objectively and they become something we can analyze
or something that may benefit us.
Through my paintings, I am interested in this duality of how I experience other people. How do the subjective and objective sides
of my interpretations meet? This process of constantly re-examining our understanding of another person is alluded to through the
oscillation of complementary visual metaphors. Through the contrasting layers, like fluctuating colors and textures against flat and
opaque color, figure and ground reversals, and figuration and abstraction, the paintings set up juxtaposed binaries of visual equivalents
for my experience of the Other. Biomorphic abstraction is placed atop a pair of legs, a form shifts from chair to design to open space:
by layering these binaries together, the paintings disrupt our natural read of another person.
In interactions, it is not the other person that changes; it is my own perception of the Other that fluctuates. My view of someone
differs from everyone else’s interpretations, and is based on my own experience of them. I can never understand the entirety of another
person. Therefore, how a person is represented rests within my own interpretation of them. I can begin to know another person by
referencing my own knowledge of my consciousness. They live through my comprehension of them.
Holly DeGrote