Homo Bulla. For this series, the artist digitally manipulated her contemporary photographic images to create compositions with visual and iconographic details evocative of the style and spirit of Renaissance master paintings. She employed the pictorial format of portraiture to elaborate on the theme of the transience of human life.
Homo Bulla (man is a bubble)
Conner Contemporary Art is pleased to introduce Julee Holcombe, an
outstanding young artist who received her MFA last year from the Maryland
Institute College of Art, Baltimore. In "Homo Bulla (man is a bubble)", her
first one-artist exhibition, Holcombe presents an extraordinary new series
of photographs that are smart, beautiful and rich in meaning.
For this series, the artist digitally manipulated her contemporary
photographic images to create elegant compositions with exacting visual and
iconographic details evocative of the style and spirit of Renaissance master
paintings. She employed the pictorial format of portraiture to elaborate on
the theme of the transience of human life. Holcombe instilled psychic
tension in each of these pictures by embedding her temporal subjects within
timeless cultural frameworks.
In the work after which she named the series, "Homo Bulla (man is a
bubble)", 2005, two children blowing bubbles are posed next to a table
containing familiar objects charged with meaning, including an hourglass and
an extinguished candle. The immediacy of the children’s portraits conjoined
with the fragility of the bubbles and the finality of the hourglass and
smoking candle convey that youth is fleeting. Yet the classic symbols
selected by the artist, and the age-old certainty of their import,
profoundly bespeak the permanence of cultural conventions that have been
codified in artistic symbolism.
Holcombe received the Portland Biennial Prize in spring 2005. Her work was
featured in London at the 2004 Scope art Holcombe’s work will be shown at
the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden, Germany, in the Fall 2005.
There will be a reception for the artist Friday, September 9, 2005 : 6-8pm.
Conner Contemporary Art
1730 Connecticut Avenue - Washington