Lateral Slip 

No Place Gallery

Columbus, OH

Aug 15-Sept 20, 2025



In one of Holmes’ twilit scenes, Hinge Point, a mauve woman tensely approaches a reclined figure with a fist clenched behind her back. What is the gesture’s intent? Is it an expression of secrecy, resentment, desire? The other figure, staring into space, doesn’t register the approach. Subtly attuned to interpersonal dynamics, Holmes’ layered films of paint give a sense of porous spillage from one body to the next, as the scales of the encounter tip from balanced intimacy to longing desperation. This is one of Holmes’ foremost talents: the ambiguous gestures of her works are capable of being interpreted backwards and forwards, once as the evocation of shared tenderness and once as the impossibility of knowing the person one loves.





Rendered in a sunken color palette, the hazy nocturnal atmosphere of these paintings evokes the difficulty of interpreting the shared space of a relationship. Even the seemingly most straightforward depictions, such as the melting embrace of two lovers in the work, Low Heat, reflects the aporia of relationships. The ferocity of the catapult into the lover’s arms almost overshadows the affection of the embrace, pointing to the fact that physical contact serves just as often a means of avoiding intimacy as establishing it. While Holmes’ oeuvre is populated by one figure staring down another, the more precarious micromoment of mutual eye contact rarely takes place. In her painting, American Wavers, which travels outside the confines of the domestic interior to an equally claustrophobic political demonstration, Holmes leverages the disengaged stare of the participants for maximum eeriness, leaving the viewer to wonder whether this is a march of solidarity or a subtle display of one-upmanship.  





Many contemporary artists who skirt the boundary of abstract and figurative painting tend to draw a link between the libidinal substance of paint and the erotic subject matter of their works. In interviews, Holmes has expressed her fondness for Amy Sillman—another artist that uses abstraction as a strange keyhole for glimpsing sexual postures while resisting objectification of the body. For Holmes, abstraction offers a tool for honoring the privacy of intimate acts and rendering the unique language cultivated between lovers. The viewer might intuit the presence of a sexual act in an abstract painting but is not privy to the immediate reality of the lovers’ experience. In this, Holmes’ paintings not only test formal strategies, like mark making, to entangle bodies but also work to track the complex space within relationships where the boundaries of personhood waver and dissolve.



-       Fionn Adamian, August 2025