I saw this raw and unapologetic study in dimensions, muted colors, and claustrophobia under the halogen lights of a supermarket where several people had installed a guerilla gallery opening; armed with nails, hammers, a cell phone, and time.
I should have been unimpressed but this piece entitled egg=head ( as well as several others in the as yet unnamed Charcoal series by Holly Labus) created it's own divergent atmosphere as it was approached, locking the eye in a collection of shadowed and bold lines that create the sort of evocative space and subconscious memories anthropologist often say they see in cave paintings.
But this piece is charcoal graphite, not paint and its feel is not primitive but subconsciously evocative like a good myth done in black and shades of grey. The oval shape carries symbolic shades; the two most prominent: the egg; a thing of alien fertility distant but internalized in the mammalian mind, and the head; the seat of consciousness and confrontation, in other words the human confrontation with the mind.
However, we see that the inside of the (inverted?) oval is vacant or empty, reminisant of a cage or a womb. The other pieces in this series carry the same atmospheric weight as egg=head without being repetitious.
