Debra Holt – ZOE Series, at ABBA FINE ART

Debra Holt. Explosion 1, 2009, 60” x 80”. C-Print. Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist and ABBA FINE ART

March 14 - May 6, 2009

Debra Holt’s Photographic Images with a Video & Sound Installation are on view from March 14 to May 6, 2009 at ABBA FINE ART.  The recent series “ZOE” are photographic images that deceive the eye and transform perception in an illusionistic process. The artist imposes an approach to water or skylines by using a photogram technique. She shoots many consecutive photos per second obtaining the same scene many times, but with slightest and imperceptible changes. Holt ironically and purposely recreates the Warhol-like process of repetition, where the subject goes into reverberation and disappearance.

Nature is not nature in the real sense in Holt’s photographs, but rather a pictorial construction of forms, outlines, textures and colors that have become unnatural, distanced from the factual, twisting into an imaginary landscape of shadows or lights counterpoint with impassive echo.

Holt has described herself as having a keenness for the earth’s natural elements and its atmospheric changes. The earth, wind, clouds, skylines and water play a major role in her artworks, but there is a special affinity between the artist and water and what it represents - water as a symbol for rebirth, cleansing and fertility, while in constant change, transforming itself. Holt captures an instant of water that is in quick and continuous transformation and creates powerful images that are bursting with color, movement, symbolism and mysticism. The results are images of ambiguous ethereal forms that appear to hold an otherworldly message.

Holt blurs the scenes of the waterfalls entitled Blue Series, turning them away from the flatness of the real. She reduces the image to blurred and jagged contours of pure tactile sensations. The artist retains the subject matter but decomposes its figurative aspect into an abstract image.

Imprecision and unreality in the dematerialization process put into question the visibleness of the eye, which attempts to perceive, in subtle torture, what is in the image.

Debra Holt received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida International University and a Master of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. She has exhibited in New York and Miami galleries and museums and is the recipient of many awards and grants including the National Sculpture Society Grant, Nancy McGrath Award, Lucrezia Bori Foundation Prize, Albert H. Hallgarten Traveling Fellowship and Artist’s Fellowship Grant.

ABBA FINE ART. 233 NW 36th Street. Miami, Florida 33127

Phone 305 576 4278

www.abbafineart.com