NYAB Event - Holli Schorno "Landed"

Holli Schorno "Landed"

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

This event has ended.

In her new series of small and large-scale collages, Landed, Holli Schorno places meticulously cut fragments from discarded geology books, home repair and wiring instructions, carpentry and masonry diagrams onto open fields of white paper, forming new configurations of seemingly beached communities. While in previous series, Schorno’s collaged mechanical and organic environments appeared to float across the picture plane, in these works she has now literally and figuratively grounded her subjects. Each system consists of landform images that suggest altered notions of the horizon and evoke the tectonic plates that form the layers of the earth’s crust. Attracted to the abstract forms in these layers, Schorno’s investigations represent a transformation not only of environmental systems, but also our notions of space and time.
Despite the grounded nature of this series, the sharp outlines of Schorno’s cut-out layers of earth and objects from man-made shelters appear to float on the page as if defying gravity. The suggestion is of an experiment in technology gone haywire, an uprooted universe that gives one a sense that things might shift at any moment. While the exact locations of these environments remain ambiguous, the landforms themselves are recognizable (plateaus, mesas, buttes and pinnacles). However, the animated structures that float among them remain abstract, perhaps alien, and outline wide expanses of open terrain in which the potential for more colonies and structures to coexist is endless.
Drawing inspiration from the Dada photomontages of artists such as Hanna Höch, whose stated purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art, Schorno's use of these themes seems much more a function of their kinetic potential and the effect of spatial relationships. The collaged elements exist in a constant state of flux, stretching and at times exploding across the picture surface. Landed features four large-scale works and additional smaller works in which Schorno's geological accumulations form expansive environments that build upon the intent of her source material. The fragments from her chosen texts describe and analyze our earth’s layers as well the ways in which humans may successfully inhabit it. Schorno’s collages invite us into a terrestrial world in which newly docked environments have found their destination and, perhaps, a new space to live.