Drew Connor Holland
three drafts of the same poem ii
Melbourne Art Fair, 2025
Works
Exhibitions
Installation views
Press release
Drew Connor Holland wants his artworks to elicit an emotional response. He doesn’t mind if you love his work or hate it; what is important is that it makes you feel something.
Holland’s artistic practice is concerned with translating abstract concepts into physical objects that can communicate their essence. His curious objects – small, beautiful paintings; a brass arrow embellished with a single ruby red gemstone – deliberately confound. Their origins are ambiguous, encouraging speculation and guesswork: they could be treasured artefacts excavated from some bygone era, or worthless items found in an op shop. The artist thinks of his works as speculative archaeologies.
The imagery in Holland’s paintings is predominantly sourced online, drawn from the endless archive of materials that already exist in the world: screenshots and downloads of images from virtual libraries of public access images uploaded by respected institutions, or images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) programs. We exist in a visual culture, saturated with images. Now, with the arrival of AI image generators, the art of image production is democratised in new ways. Anyone can create an image with a mere prompt. He is interested in interrogating how, in this context, we evaluate and ascribe notions of authenticity and value.
Holland’s practice relies on the use of modern technologies, yet he is not interested in the perfection to which technology and machines aspire. Rather, he embraces imperfections and failures, wanting to see the process and struggles: the humanity. One of the things that interests Holland about AI is its continuous cycle of obsolescence and evolution. Like its human counterparts, AI is constantly learning from its mistakes and failures. Holland decided to seek out and bookmark these moments of failure before they disappeared forever. In the not-so-distant past, he discovered that the platform OpenAI could not recognise or generate the letters of the English alphabet. Engaging in a metaphysical thought experiment, he used the image generator to draw a hypothetical alphabet, which materialised as abstract line drawings. These beautiful failures capture a specific moment in time of the machine’s learning. We can empathise with this attempt at language because there is something so undeniably human about it.
For another body of work, Holland utilised a different AI tool, a 10-by-10-centimetre image generation app called Craiyon. Ironically, the tool happens to be good at generating images of chromolithographs – a type of printmakin developed in the 19th century that was used to create colour imagery, often reproductions of famous paintings. At the time, people were worried that these ‘inauthentic’ facsimiles would undermine human ability or decrease desire for original artworks. Sound familiar? Inspired by the apple visualisation test that became a viral internet trend, and the metaphysical debates that arose online, Holland started browsing other people’s AI-generated images of apples.
Holland selects his images intuitively, led by formal concerns such as colour and composition; what works aesthetically. In a process of analogue image transfer, the images are translated from the digital into the physical using low-fi stationary materials. The material container for the image might take the form of handmade paper, bed sheets salvaged from his grandmother’s garage, pieces of wood or other found materials. Holland then subjects the works to what he describes as a ‘Mr-Bean-movie-esque’ process of manipulation, in which he corrodes the surface and integrity of the image through staining, varnishing and overpainting. His intention is to create a faux aged appearance, in the manner of a fake or forgery. But Holland’s artworks are not fakes, or reproductions of an original, but translations of an existing image or object into new material form.
His sources of inspiration are surprisingly varied, encompassing Édouard Manet’s study for The Execution of Emperor Maximilian; découpage, a craft technique loved by his grandmother; Anne Carson’s poetry; and the animated film The Iron Giant. Perhaps what links these references is their sentimentality. He is interested in the idea that something which holds no real material worth can contain huge sentimental value. Leaning into this notion, the artist’s memories, experiences and emotions all factor into the images and materials he selects, resulting in artworks that are imbued with layers of personal and collective histories.
Holland is drawn to objects and references that are situated in a particular time and place, knowing that someday – either soon or far in the future – they will become obsolete or irrelevant or no one will understand their purpose. In many cases he uses remnants that had been forgotten or cast aside until he decided to salvage them and imbue them with value. Holland deliberately displaces his objects and images from their original context and time, offering them a chance at a second life. He imagines what story his objects will tell if they are discovered in one hundred years: what they will say about our present time? It comforts him to think that long after humans are gone, our physical artefacts will live on, providing clues to the way we lived.
— Text by Laura Couttie
