Deborah-Joyce Holman: Close-Up | Elephant
Jan 20 2025
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Reframe is a monthly column in which contributor Sam Falb discusses timely openings to view in New York. Each edition offers commentary on the latest exhibitions, performances, and installations. Dynamic and ever-evolving, the content reflects the fluidity of the market it travels through.
Swiss Institute: Close-Up (January 22 – April 23)
The work of artist Deborah-Joyce Holman has landed in New York for their first institutional exhibition in the States with Close-Up. Holman engages with the medium of video (masterfully, with a narrative poise that’s equal-parts arresting and visually hypnotic) to explore strains of political representation and the ongoing wrestle surrounding racial profiling, gender inequity, and capitalism. It’s intimate, with a lens trained on the actress’s face and form as she completes humdrum tasks – drinking tea, lying on a couch – in a framing featuring a pan of a home’s interior space and architectural details. The work is a restaging of 2023’s Close-up/Quiet as it’s kept, a previous video work featured at TANK Shanghai over the summer as the artist’s first Asian showing. The everyday commentary on social discourse and economics crosses between the two video pieces, and provides viewers with an unguarded intimacy alongside the subject of the film. The work asks viewers to interrogate the narrative: What is the nature of this character? What struggles does she face? Holman creates a dialogue that oscillates between the personal and the systemic, urging viewers to confront the subtle yet pervasive forces shaping identity and representation. Perhaps show notes share it best: “Close-Up looks beyond political grammars of repair to consider the quiet, disruptive frequencies of Black feminine agency within the filmic field of representation.”