Holly Kranker
Holly Kranker
Holly Kranker is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice uses a variety of mediums to examine our sense of place, personal memory, and efforts to suspend moments in time. In addition to her art practice, she is the Residency Program Manager at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts located in Omaha, Nebraska. She is responsible for all activities related to the organization’s international Artist-in-Residence program. Prior to joining Bemis, she was the studio manager and lead assistant to renowned glass sculptor, Therman Statom. Kranker has most recently exhibited at the Joslyn Art Museum and has received awards from the Birger Sandzèn Memorial Gallery in contemporary metal craft, George A. Spiva Center for the Arts in photography, and has work included in the National Park Foundation-Lewis and Clark Historic Trail permanent collection. She was an artist-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in 2018.
In a world constantly in flux, we long to retain moments, grasping for the ephemeral to become static and fixed. The desire to return to a highlighted moment, once experienced, then later revisited, creates the illusion that we can somehow control time, the ethereal. A fleeting moment can forever live within oneself. In this futile attempt to capture and hold a past experience, one’s efforts become regurgitated through catalogued methods of guileless documentation: haphazard photographs, scribbles in notebooks, amateur video, selfies, snapshot memories.
Memory is transposed/transformed into a realized, tangible/tactile object. It exists within its own perimeters of time and space, its adjacent environment. This context forces a shift for the object to become new, with a new vernacular, a new identity- extracted from reality and placed into another arena of dimension and representation. There is no clear narrative or sequence of events. As the onset of memory comes to us in fragments and in flickering images triggered by real time, we find ourselves toggling between past and present.