It’s Love (2021), like the oeuvre of multidisciplinary Naarm/Melbourne-based artist Holly Block, sits outside the canon – subverting the curated and pulling past the discernible.
It’s Love arcs on an incubation between artist and material locating and releasing a previously hidden emotional vibration. In the studio, Block anchors herself to communicate internally and aloud with her hunted and gathered materials.
Through this private ritualised correspondence, she opens their desire, her love preparing a passage that no one has given them before.
While Block’s previous work, such as Techno-Romance featured in RMIT’s FutureU, communicated a defined social critique, her current work resists specificity. Instead, she embalms intuitive, rather than a conceptual, language. Block affixes herself to the installation, including her childhood dolls and referencing (and rejecting) parental pressure for self-perfection. But her sense of self never intervenes. Instead, her presence serves as a muscle to languish for the universal, with her practice flexing spiritual give-ways.
To achieve this, Block embodies her central figures, two dolls humanised by a tender embrace, with psychological complexity. The emotion of these flawed, discomforted, precious bodies – the searching eyes of ‘the baby’, the dented head of ‘the mother’ – transfer a transgressive power which ascribes delight throughout the installation. Block honours their desire to nourish and nurture. One monstrous form loves another.
Reformed and shifted, her objects embrace their monstrous selves. Connected through their relationship, Block clears them from her care in their altered state as It’s Love’s gravity centre, the things are independent on the other side of their creation. She then can sustain a fondness for them without proximity to their stage, allowing them to reveal or withdraw at their will.
It’s Love’s staging pulls at perception. Its surreal composition with little aesthetic refinement carries charm and unease. While Block taps into the magical realm of a toy, the dolls never satisfy in their form, nor does the barred-back, worn setting echo the multiverse to which they belong than beckon the unrecognisable. Behind the dolls, a mirror with a vintage frame smeared with Vaseline obscures reflection. On inspection, the words ‘You are beautiful’ become apparent.
Distanced from reality, the installation dismembers time. The room presumes abandonment while still a home. The dolls don’t evoke nostalgia but an omnipresence: a child holds a child, mothering and being mothered. The mise-en-scène of the tactile décor circularises history: harking to the ancient, the afterlife, the 1970s of Block’s childhood, an ageing museum exhibit, a contemporary stage. Overlapping between imagination and reality, the It’s Love maintains a foreboding continuation beyond its own image.
In this work, Block bridges vulnerability and control: the need for the quantifiable at odds, alluring the unseen on a personally open-ended journey. The objects hold-and-release perception, but their performance stops before the crescendo. On a precipice, the viewer feels tension to close the distance of their awareness as It’s Love, with tenderness, slips between the tangible and triggers an occurrence of something beyond.
About Holly Block
Holly Block lives and works in Melbourne and is a currently studying her Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at MARS gallery (Melbourne) and Seventh Gallery (Melbourne), and has exhibited at Spring 1883 (MARS gallery), George Paton Gallery (Melbourne), Dirty Dozen (Melbourne), Trodadero Art Space (Melbourne), Darwin Visual Arts Association (Darwin) and Viewpoints Gallery (Bendigo). She has over 13 years experience as a dancer, choreographer and performer and been awarded an arts grant for Maribrynong Council for new works. In 2014 she established Tribe for Art, an artist collective, shared studio space and community for mothers who were artists. Her work has been published in The Sleepover Club, January 2016 and Precinct 15, 2015
Holly Block’s practice is multidisciplinary with a focus on video, photography, and performance. Block’s most recent practice explores the impact of technology on human behaviour sexually, socially and romantically with a particular focus on dating applicants such as Tinder. Her oeuvre has deployed reoccurring motifs of skin, hair and hairlessness to explore her own subconscious knots around sexuality, femininity and personal power, while her background in psychology and choreography inform her interest in the performance of gender and identity, seeking to reveal the instability of these states. Moreover, her works suggest that as much as these performances are for others they are also performed for ourselves and this slippery oscillation between the personal and the social imbue her work with an uncanny resonance.