"Getting My Way and Whining About It," an exhibition of paintings by Miranda Holmes, will be on display through Sept. 7, in the Art Alley, HUB-Robeson Galleries on the University Park campus of Penn State.
A free and public reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Sept. 5.
As we move through everyday life amidst political uncertainty and fear, we search for the broken parts to reveal where we went wrong. Miranda Holmes’ work enters into this conversation through the ambiguous nature of her paintings’ narratives as well as their underlying feelings of unsettledness.
By using sickly high key colors and foggy darks to poke fun at both the absurdity of our gaffes and the dread of our more cutting mistakes, Holmes’ work addresses the culpability of human actions. She creates a sense of ambiguity in her paintings by leaving out certain clues which allows the viewer to pass judgment on where the scene went wrong.
Providing contrast to the underlying violence and irony are a variety of quieter moments, found in the form of fog-ridden trees, the glow of a campfire, or a muscular rock. These shifts between moments of clarity and hope to areas of obscurity and despair are representative of her reactions to the daily uncertainty Holmes faces as she struggles to make sense of the swift changes in her world.
Miranda Holmes is a State College, Pennsylvania, native and a recent graduate of Penn State, where she earned her bachelor of fine arts in painting and drawing. She has shown her work in several exhibitions in the State College area, including the HUB-Robeson Galleries’ Art on the Move program in 2016.
She was awarded the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Summer School of Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, in 2016.
For more information on this and other exhibitions, visit the website at studentaffairs.psu.edu/hub/artgalleries.