Photo Journal Monday: Rhonda Holberton
Still Life (Just This One Thing: Honey Comb)
Instagram account
2016 - present
© Rhonda Holberton
Writing and Photos by Rhonda Holberton
Holberton’s ongoing interest in so-called “Instagram aesthetics” inhabits that very same digital realm in Just This One Thing. This series consists of 3D-scanned personal belongings, staged in virtual space to mimic the sterile aesthetic of popular lifestyle magazines like Kinfolk and Cereal. To display these stills, Holberton populates her Instagram feed with the uncanny images, exploring the way the self is constructed on social media not only via selfies, but also through the curation of aestheticized commodities extracted from their native contexts.
Still Life (Just This One Thing: Vanitas)
Instagram account
2016 - present
© Rhonda Holberton
As the title Still Life suggests, this exhibition considers the relationship between stillness and life, inanimate and animate, in today’s image inundated world. While the commissioned still life painting was once a rarified symbol of status, this slow tradition now continues in streams of multiplicity. Holberton reflects upon the smart-phoned classes compulsively and carefully arranging, digitally displaying, and sharing their personal ephemera at incredible speed with both still images (Just This One Thing) and animations (The Drone is not Distracted by the Perfume of Flowers). Yet instead of photographs of her own mundane belongings, Holberton presents 3D scans carefully knitted together within a CGI programming environment. This belabored manufacture produces a new form of ‘objet’ that is nearly physical yet entirely artificial.
Still Life (Just This One Thing: Pillow Books Petrified Wood)
Instagram account
2016 - present
© Rhonda Holberton
This series consists of 3D-scans of personal belongings, staged in virtual space to mimic the sterile aesthetic of popular lifestyle magazines like Kinfolk and Cereal. To display these stills, I populate my Instagram feed with the uncanny images, exploring the way the self is constructed on social media not only via selfies, but also through the curation of aestheticized commodities extracted from their native contexts.
The sterile images tend to reduce/neutralize the object they represent. The allure of these heavily neutered images is not surprising; the messy things themselves are divorced from material consequence but have an immaterial valence that signify self and identity online. I was thinking a lot about the currency of digital aesthetics; how platforms that circulate images of images seem to be accumulating wealth at massive rates. Where is the value in these ‘free’ models of aesthetic exchange and who is producing it?
Still Life (Just This One Thing: Eggs)
Instagram account
2016 - present
© Rhonda Holberton
When we talk about brands as individuals or influencers as brands, what does that mean? That becomes a little bit slippery and I don't think we've really reconciled how to address that. Advertising uses fear of inadequacy to sell products to us. If we're re-performing popular advertising tropes on social media to increase the visibility, likeability, or shareability of our content, that construction of identity stems from a reproduction of anxiety between object and desire, or at the very least identity as a product for other people.
Still Life (Just This One Thing: Lilly II)
Instagram account
2016 - present
© Rhonda Holberton
My image of what people are doing, my imagination about what people are doing, how they're spending their time, and what they look like is very different than my experience out in the real world. These worlds don't align, but I am constantly overlaying a mental projection of the world—much of which is informed by human interactions on social media—on top of my lived experience.
Still Life (Just This One Thing: Mugs Flower)
Instagram account
2016 - present
© Rhonda Holberton
