Biography
Tanya Hollis (b. Connecticut, 1970) was raised on the Treasure Coast of Florida, but has lived and worked in New York, Buffalo, and now resides in San Francisco since 1999. Her earliest formative experience was an encounter with the familiar pedagogical tool of the diorama used as historical illustration or prop to social science, which Hollis, as a child, imaginatively located “history” and “science” in the construction of the diorama itself. In many ways her visual work continues to develop from this initial misprision as an ongoing fascination with the literal construction of history and its devices – the construction of scaled landscapes, the display case, the vitrine, and the altered manuscript. Hollis’s work has been exhibited in the Bay Area, as well as Los Angeles and Portland, and has been published in architecture magazines and numerous literary and art publications. Tanya is one of twelve artists that together run the Right Window Gallery on Valencia Street in San Francisco, and works as an archivist at the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University.
Artist Statement
My art practice has increasingly come to site itself in the gaps and fissures of archival practice itself, the traumas that a positive practice of documentary history forgets or represses. The tendency of fixative tape to lift text off newsprint, the erosion of paper into texture and fiber, the attenuation of context around the fragment – where archival practice must approach these as problems to be solved, my assemblages and works on canvas treat them as a condition of possibility. These décollages of found fragments, “overheard” integers of evidence, enters whole into a logic of placement and layering, referencing "history" as an assemblage of positive object-facts: scientific journals, newspapers and bureaucratic forms. This work lies somewhere between the backrooms of special collections and the gutters and demolition sites of urban archaeology. An approach to the contemporary ruin is at its center. The décollage works begin to offer what Rob Halpern characterizes as “a negative imprint of the archive.” Halpern continues: “This work struggles with history's underside, where what remains legible is but a trace of material abrasion, a scar of illegible social force. What appears is a residue of "meaning" after our own processes of "cultural cleansing" (however euphemized by the rhetoric of the posterity) reduce lived stories to a few barely legible scrapes, and stray utterance. Textured material, and color – all that is visible to the senses – occupies the vast blank of historical erasure.”
The PARCH series was initially inspired by the view from the top of Telescope Peak looking out over a landscape altered by California’s ongoing drought in 2015, and continues into the present as a response to the now seemingly permanent state of drought and devastation from fire. Grounded in the belief that there is no distinction between environmental and humanitarian concerns, the PARCH series is an attempt to articulate - both to the artist and to the viewer - the intensity and terror of that which is already in motion: cataclysmic change that has etched itself visibly into the land with an alarming rapidity. Working with plaster, steel, carbon and salt, the panels are flooded with water again and again, creating in a day the abstraction of a landscape that is visible from multiple vantage points - from a distance, and below our feet. As the panels dry, the materials themselves generate fissures and cracks, and leave evidence of receding waters, an attempt to come to terms with the recognition that, rather than in some unforeseeable future, we are already witnesses to what may be the irreversible summation of human history.