Activity The Homecoming

From her memories of childhood and her experience as a woman, Holly Andres creates a narrative using photographic images wherein young women and children are generally the central topics. We can therefore recognize it as a personal artistic activity where the moment captured mingles with memories of the past. Often based on her own experiences, Holly Andres presents carefully orchestrated scenes within which one can perceive ambient tension, a kind of response to an important event that has taken or will take place. In both fine art and commercial art, her cinematographic-style works offer up strong emotions that evoke reactions or call up memories.

The homecoming

Photography, 2010-2015

The Homecoming is a selection of photographs put together especially for the Festival with its True or False theme. They are part of four distinct narrative series where formative childhood memories were reconstructed by the artist as cinematic melodramas. In the context of the theme and in conversation with the works of Siân Davey on domesticity and families, Andres’s works reveals itself as an interesting way to show how some artists choose to reconstitute or create stories expressing memories or family bonds in the imaginary form. The Fallen Fawn (2015), Anna’s Birthday Party (2010), Summer of the Hornets (2015), and Nolan’s Bedtime Story (2011) “document” a group of fictitious families that intersect at times through their children. The narratives are abstractions of real-life events relayed to Andres by the actual participants in the images, specifically childhood memories in which mothers performed heroic acts. Whether in explicit action – such as a mother pulling children out of a smoking car – or in implicit acts like protecting a child from destructive information, Holly Andres is interested in examining and enshrining these courageous bonds.

Curator : Maude Arsenault