December 2808 -January 2009
Holly Tingley: Companion Planes

by Christine Unger

Holly Tingley’s paintings exist in a phenomenological tradition—evoking the condition of perception in both their subject matter and their execution. They balance between well-conceived technical approaches that indicate the direction of her thoughts and an understanding approach to her subjects. The application of reflection, doubling, as well as the submersive layering of her canvases, convey the uncanny impermanence of the present, and the elusive nature of time. At the same time the sensitive lines and strokes that describe her figures add conviction and sincerity to a somewhat eerie perception of the world. The traces of Tingley’s process remain apparent and integral in her final paintings. The folded canvas disallows the illusionist potential of a direct and unbroken surface while affirming the disjunction of the observed from one blink of an eye to the next.  She questions the structure of time and the certainty of the captured image. Her works propose the verity and the consolation of indefinite time.

Tingley’s work follows a highly focused philosophical enquiry into the nature of identity elicited by the real or perceived presence of a double: a twin, a doppelganger, a double image, a reflection. The doppelganger and the twin have long been subjects of her work both directly and indirectly. Her fascination is more than a rich source of distanced contemplation. It is very evidently an avenue of personal exploration that gives her paintings a sincerity that penetrates beyond what might otherwise become a clinical or academic process. The double or the twin plays the role of an extended metaphor for the human condition.

Tingley’s subject matter: family, friends, people close to her, are portrayed neither as conventional portraits nor sociological “types”.  A personal identification with her subjects infuses her paintings with a depth that goes beyond the perceptions of a simple portrait or the “soul capturing” photograph. The people Tingley paints seem, more than anything, a reflection of the mutable/impermanent quality of identity and identification, indivisible from the ever-changing time and space in which they appear. They are submerged in their surroundings, revealing more or less of themselves moment to moment.

The two earliest works in this show, Irene, Irene and In Retrospect, home in on the face as a seat of identity and identification and pose fundamental questions about the continuity of self-awareness. Irene, Irene provides a split image: same but different, a not quite perfect reflection, and between the two selves a horizon line—perhaps a psychological event horizon.  It suggests that despite surface similarities, there remains an impenetrable horizon that separates our thoughts and memories from one another. Similarly, In Retrospect, a face is set against its own imperfect reflection. The interesting feature of this diptych however is, again, the space “between”, the negative space where the two heads meet like cortically conjoined twins and overtakes the focus of the painting. This fathomless murky green space bleeds into its surroundings like a Rorschach ink blot, suggesting that identity is pinned to a continuous psychological state that is not specific to time, but rather to an internal constant tied to a greater external reality.

In their sense of impermanence and familiarity Tingley’s images are empathetic; the tenderness of their linear descriptions and the sensitive layering evoke the fragility of nature. They imbue a profound sense of human mortality—its beauty and courage and the comforting presence of the beating heart just below the surface of flesh. Likeness and difference confirm one another in the fractured and refractive surface of superimposed linear existence, with its inevitable end-point denied by the function of memory and the ineradicable thumbprints of time.