Rough Trade Nottingham
23rd Jan - 6th Feb 2015
7-11pm
Joey Holder is an artist making a lot of noise right now. Solo and group shows, book and vinyl contributions, collaborations, talks and conferences, the woman is busy.
Our current artist in residence at Crate Diggin at Rough Trade Nottingham operates everywhere. When I mean everywhere, I mean that Joey Holder is always working, on multiple platforms in multiple disciplines with exhibitions and ideas overlapping, where the fully realised installation piece is as relevant to the sum of her vision as a retweet or a shared post on one of the forty plus Tumblr sites that she maintains.
Systems. Interconnectivity. Apocalyptic visions that are also utopian, the man-made future/present’s relationship with the smallest amoebic lifeforms, the misunderstood ‘otherness’ of macrobiotic life and how they are mirrored or replicated in our digital existence.
Joey’s work particularly excites us because of it’s density, it’s lack of answers and clarification, it’s possibilities. She steals and appropriates content from deep in the Net.Trawling for her beloved marine life but also for the edges of science and wonder. She samples like a musician, like a Madlib, beat-juggling images, scratching into the surfaces, freestyling. Her installations feel like raves. Her current solo show at Project Native Informant in London made me feel like I was in the belly of Jonah’s whale, except the whale had swallowed up Jonah from his job in the gaming industry and I had taken mescaline. The room breathes and lives and blinks at the viewer. It’s also beautiful. Let’s not forget, Joey creates art..some of it is ugly but her palette is hers alone. It feels unexpectedly organic and alive yet also digital and fake and kind of heavy.