THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF FREEZING (ROBERTA HOLDEN: HORROR VACUI OR A STATE OF GRACE?)
The most transcendent photograph in this series is “Night Returning,” which channels Arnold Böcklin’s “The Isle of the Dead,” albeit in more placid tones. This moment conjures the image of a celestial portal with its stark, unremitting symmetry, melding the austerity of Valhalla with the etherea of Brahman, and whose pure abstraction could lead one to interject a myriad narratives: Hasegawa Tohaku’s screen painting set to Sibelius’ “Finlandia,” or perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s Stargate sequence from “2001″ imagined as a sfumato sketch by Seurat. Fundamentally, its lack of information is the very thing that precipitates such fancies. Holden takes this a step further with “Sunyata: Glacier” and “Sunyata: Ocean,” two aptly-named minimalist photographs. From Wikipedia:
In “Mont-Francais” we are confronted with the mysterious floating figure, which comically reduces the mountain to a mere sand dune because of the lack of depth cues, much like the isomorphic perspective of an Oriental landscape. Because of her allusions to Mahayana Buddhism, I’m tempted to view my own fancies with suspicion: does she intend to capture the figure as a pure, ontic being, or does it represent an idea of being-ness? A better question might be: does Holden retroactively infer this Zen detachment with her titles, or does she frame all of her shots with Bhudda-nature in mind? Looking at this picture through a Campbellian lens, the silhouette appears anchored to the plane with a hair-thin umbilical cord, juxtaposing the fragile notion of the unborn child with that of the universal cosmonaut; the neonate exists in its vacuum like a thoughtless ether or a dissembled soul after Pari Nirvana, while the adult traveler willfully and deliberately ventures into the unknown (the threshold of adventure), risking a physical body (apotheosis) for the sake of attaining a similar selflessness (sacred elixer). If the hero archetype seems a bit of a stretch, consider the following from Holden’s online biography:
Growing up on a sailboat on the coast of British Columbia and harvesting wild rice on isolated lakes of Manitoba for the first fourteen years of her life, Roberta developed a love of remote and rugged environments, solitude and open spaces. From these early experiences grew an insatiable curiosity to explore and the invaluable skills of self-reliance that laid the groundwork for her later mountaineering and single-handed offshore sailing projects. It seems just as natural that these inspirations would fuel her passion for photography and, that photography in turn would allow Roberta to continue her explorations from a new perspective…Roberta currently volunteers as a search and rescuer with the Lions Bay Mountain Rescue Team north of Vancouver.
Holden embodies the artist-as-hero by documenting her flirtations with the abyss. This leads us to imagine more than just the “beingness” of the shot, but also her well-being while taking it (see “Southern Ocean I, II, and III,” which marry the savagery of Winslow Homer with the shimmering veneer of Mapplethorpe).
WORDS FOR SNOW:
There’s a sense of hurriedness in this second group of landscapes, a suggestion that to hold still with a camera for too long in Antarctic Canada is to invite frostbite. The dangers appear manifold: Holden shoots with a stunned curiosity, as if she happened upon a Yeti or is fleeing itinerant prospectors and bloodhounds. There’s even a touch of Robert Capa at Omaha Beach in her most surreal picture, “Running Up the Road.” Is the figure atop the knoll an enemy? A family member? A totemic spirit or cairn? Holden’s images are gravid with meaning, yet seemingly bereft of narrative at the same time, as if Franz Kline had lightly gessoed over Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Her companion piece to this photo is “Night Walk,” which also eschews the stoic clarity one associates with northern climes; in its stead, another floating, ominous silhouette. Holden, whether by design or unconscious habit, gives her more frightening pictures precious titles, perhaps to minimize the visceral dread. Take, for instance, “Inviting House in a Blizzard.” My first inclination: there is nothing in the least bit inviting about this house, which resembles a blast furnace more so than a warm hearth. It readily conjures the superheated tombs of the Sixth Circle in Dante’s Inferno or a white-hot smelting pot from a Chicago steel mill, circa 1930 (in short, more like Vulcan’s forge than grandmother’s winter cottage). Whether we are looking at the noirish glowering headlights of “Dark Street” or the post-apocalyptic fearscapes of “Tundra, “Blizzard at Night,” “Ulukhaktok,” and “Powerlines,” it is clear that there is no safe haven in Holden’s Judecca; not even the shivering “Church,” the archetypal sanctuary of sanctuaries, is inured to the cold.
