Jim Holyoak: Vestigial Trail
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Kootenay Gallery of Art, History and Science 120 Heritage Way, Castlegar, British Columbia V1N 4M5
Jim Holyoak, "Alterity of Person and Place," 2022
Vestigial Trail
Drawings and written work by Jim Holyoak
All his life, Jim Holyoak has drawn and contemplated the monstrous, and in recent years he has voraciously read books on Monster Theory, the scholarly study of monsters. Whether a ‘monster’ is perceived as wonderful or terrible, wrathful or protective, human or nonhuman, is a distinction made in the eye of the beholder. Monsters are speculative beings that simultaneously don’t, did or might exist. They are the unknown, the misunderstood and the profoundly different. There are monstrous situations, behaviours and attitudes, monstrous feelings, places and times. Thinking about monsters is an exercise in alterity – the study of otherness – and our resultant capacities for empathy, cruelty and indifference – making strange and making kin. ‘Othering’ that which is different from oneself is a process that might otherwise be called ‘Monstering.’