Sharon Barnes

February 1-March 30, 2021

Holla Holla Holla (2020), 12 feet x 9 feet x 3 feet installation, painted and collaged church fans, acrylic, inkjet prints, string

Holla Holla Holla is a large-scale corner installation consisting of over 100 painted and resurfaced church fans that appear to float in the air. These fans refer to the origins of the civil rights racial justice movement centered in the Black church, and its overlap into the contemporary context of recent public outcry.

Barnes is interested in the potential of objects to speak about the human condition. More specifically, she explores the intersections of form, language and history, i.e. the way history (personal and political) and language can be embedded in visual form in such a way that they reverberate to the present. The church fans, initially encoded as female, can also be thought to “fan the flames” or recall demonstration placards, especially as their handles point downwards, ready to be grabbed. In the title Holla Holla Holla we can even “hear” the sound of call-and-response used by hip hop performers, as well as preachers and protest marches alike.

Here we have a representation of 3 dimensions with 2-dimensional objects, employing tenets of both analytical cubism (breaking down a whole into fragments) and synthetic cubism (flattening out the whole with no reference to space) in the sense that we actually experience the sculpture as a photograph. The result is an installation, composed of modular units, that explodes and implodes representing simultaneously unity and fragmentation. It traverses the distance from form, to content, and back to form in a poetics of materiality.