JIM HOLYOAK: BOOK OF NINETEEN NOCTURNES
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Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art 103-421 Cawston Ave, Rotary Centre for the Arts, Kelowna, British Columbia V1Y 6Z1
Jim Holyoak, " Book of Nineteen Nocturnes," 2017
installation view
Opening Reception January 19 @ 7pm
“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters. Fantasy united with reason is the mother of the arts, and a source of wonders.”
– Francisco Goya
Jim Holyoak’s discipline is composed of drawing and writing, artists’ books and room-sized installations, exploring (or perhaps wandering,) the border realms between perception and fantasy, humanity and the non-human, deep time and the present. What we think about, remember and imagine has powerful effects on how we perceive and experience, on what we believe and how we behave. This is what prevents him from dismissing the imaginary as completely unreal.
Over the last twenty years, Holyoak has amassed an enormous collection of papers – ranging in scale from postcards to murals – drawn, written, wrinkled and saturated with ink. Some are pieces unto themselves, some are pages for hand-bound books and zines, and some are materials for dense installation-environments, tailored to the architecture of the rooms that they occupy.
Though the content of his work ranges from the biological to the phantasmagorical, there is a persistent interest in human empathy for other species, and in the difficulty of fathoming deep time – the world millions of years ago, and the world ahead. The animals he contemplates most are the species that never existed, that no longer exist, and those that are on the brink of extinction. For example, dinosaurs fascinate him because they are completely real and completely imaginary – they are monsters for real. This tension between what is real and imaginary, what once existed and no longer exists, is the uniting principle in all his work.
Just as fairytales have often served a cautionary function, he hopes these drawings of monstrous beings and lonely places may cast some doubt over assumptions of human preeminence.
Statement on the ‘Book of Nineteen Nocturnes’
Holyoak has recently finished a major book-work – a graphic novel 500 pages long, 17 years in the making. This project is entitled Book of Nineteen Nocturnes. Each of the 19 chapters is bound as a separate accordion book, containing ink-paintings, graphite drawings, watercolours, ink-jet prints and collaged text.
Much of the book’s imagery and writing was developed while traveling (often trekking) throughout British Columbia, Nordic Europe, the Himalayas and China. Although the story and setting are fictitious, both are heavily inspired by these places: the animals and vegetation, the landscapes and skies, and the shifts in weather and lighting. By a process of walking with these pages in a backpack, and notes in his pocket, fragments were collected over many years, and then woven together like a cadavre exquis, blending the observed with the imagined.
The story this book tells, is set in a forest without sunrise. Its plot is entangled within and driven by this nocturnal setting, echoing the genres of painterly and musical nocturnes. The storyline, as with his process, follows a dream-logic of associative connections, rather than a conventional or pre-conceived story-arch. Through a hallucinogenic flow of events, things change, then change again.
The protagonist is a woman made of wood, named Book, whose fate is to wander. In every chapter, Book dreams, awakens, walks, converses with animals and monsters, and then falls back asleep. It is about being lost, lonely and homesick.
Holyoak’s intention is for the book to be touched by anyone who wishes to turn its pages. While relating to graphic novels and illustrated fairy-tales, this experience is also akin to an encounter with an illuminated manuscript or a grimoire.