Parafin is delighted to present an exhibition exploring Nancy Holt’s use of language in her ground-breaking work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It presents for the first time in the UK the major video installation ‘Points of View’ (1974), a selection of early concrete poems and photoworks.
Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was a member of the Earth, Land, and Conceptual art movements and a pioneer of site-specific installation and moving image work. Throughout her artistic practice language and systems of perception were key concerns. Holt’s earliest artworks were concrete poems, and many of her film and video works focus on communication, interpretation and the subjectivity of language.
In 1966 Holt began creating concrete poems and text-based works of art. These important early works announce many themes that would preoccupy her: sight, site, systems, place and geography. In her 1972 journal she noted a fascination with making words “concrete through vision.” Holt treated words as discrete entities to be deployed in spatial strategies that defy and confound conventional narrative meaning.
In the 1970s Holt’s interest in framing vision and making words material led her to explore the productive miscommunications that occur when information is imperfectly transferred from one medium to another. She addressed this in early 1970s video works, such as ‘Zeroing In’ (1973) and her collaborations with Richard Serra and Charlemagne Palestine, ‘Boomerang’ and ‘Match Match their Courage’ (1974). The four screen video installation ‘Points of View’ exemplifies this experiment, revealing — as she notes in her journal — “the wonder of place through verbal description.”
In 2021 Holt’s work is the focus of an ambitious exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts in Ireland, and she will be the subject of a major retrospective at Bildmuseet, Sweden in 2022.