EVAN HOLLOWAY Cobbler

Holloway pursues the labyrinthine paths of sculpture’s long history, producing works that reflect an altogether contemporary state of mind while drawing liberally from modernist, ancient, esoteric, and popular lineages. This polymathic sensibility has allowed him to produce works that are unmistakably his own, both in terms of concept and execution. Forgoing the kind of industrialized processes that many artists would use to produce similarly ambitious forms, Holloway works hands-on, at 1:1 scale, creating objects that are attuned in equal measure to internal weather patterns of intuition and abstraction, collective cultural phenomena, and a sense of connection with a wide range of audiences.

In Cobbler, Holloway presents new works in which he incorporates sculptures of dresses and shoes he has made himself, as well as elements that slyly appropriate the mechanics of retail display. As a whole, the show wears the garb of a store as kind of formal drag, one in which fashion and commercialism are spiked with mind-expanding doses of color, geometry, and material experimentation. As looking becomes conflated with browsing and buying, interaction with art becomes more personalized, more deeply caught up in personal modes of relating that include physical desire and affiliation with a preferred aesthetic. Holloway draws paradoxical inspiration from the increasingly common cross-pollination between art and fashion, looking for cues not only from the world of haute couture, but from the ways in which designers borrow—and take—from artists.

The inclusion of objects based on garments also underscores the ways in which Holloway’s work emerges from—and maintains dialogue with—the size and proportions of the individual human body. Even the largest sculptures on view in Cobbler make this connection clear. Display with Mirror (2024), for instance, features a spiraling conical form whose steel structure is covered with dyed canvas panels. A circular mirror has been installed at the wide end of the cone, which touches the floor, bringing the potential presence of the viewer’s image into the work’s visual orbit. Each detail of the sculpture is a testament to physical contact. The canvas panels are affixed to the work’s frame with small lengths of copper wire, suggesting that close-up looking has an equivalent in the proximity of touch. The garment-like forms that hang at its center, meanwhile, function as abstract collections of hues, textures, and shapes in addition to objects that might, in another context, be handled or worn.

Mystical or numerical systems have often supplied Holloway with principles that guide the elaboration of his work. In Cobbler he mines the aesthetic possibilities of retail display in an analogous fashion, a shift that allows him to question the perceived standalone masculinity of sculpture specifically and of modernist formalism more generally. Floor-based, medium-scale sculptures featuring objects that resemble shoes, for example, provocatively flirt with boutique-oriented functionality even as they demand to be read as subtly constructed compositions in volumetric space. The steel components of these works, which rest on the floor, resemble linear drawings in three-dimensions. Their loops, angles, and twisting, ladder-like shapes feel both organic and architectural, negotiating an indeterminate space between expressivity and support. Highly complex forms masquerading as bases, they hold painted wood boards cut into irregular shapes that in turn provide platforms for Holloway’s inventive, humorous, and heterogeneous takes on footwear.

Each shoe sculpture is an assemblage produced from an array of materials—among them license plates, cut segments of bicycle chains, appliance switches, fabric, and wood—whose familiarity is further accentuated by the surprise of their combination. Like those that include fabric, these works also indicate the absence of a body that they nonetheless seem to conjure in thin air. In this respect, the works perform a kind of humble magic, even as they continuously focus here-and-now attention on the basic components of which they are made and demonstrate how informality can co-exist with precision and careful workmanship. Wall-based sculptures that feature the shoes, meanwhile, emphasize their dual functionality as representational forms that nonetheless prompt non-objective readings. The shoes’ stylistic variety is matched here by thick, many-faceted wood supports that jut out from the wall. Though the format of these works brings them into conversation with painting, the artist has constructed them so that they stubbornly retain their thing-ness along with a measure of otherworldly curiosity.

Throughout Cobbler, Holloway shows how the everyday tactility of things near-at-hand contains the potential to experiences that border on the mystical. To make the works on paper whose vertiginous swarms of lines and colors provide counterpoints to the sculptures, he affixes sheets of paper to a turntable, marking them with ink as they are intermittently rotated. The use of this automatic procedure introduces both freedom of movement and freedom of intention, evoking the patterns—and patterned chaos—that exist at every level of nature. Folds in the paper, as well as spots where the surface has been worn by repetitive marking, serve as reminders that material processes gave rise to these images and that things are built up in seemingly flat spaces as well as volumetric ones, not to mention the immaterial spaces of the mind where concepts and visions originate and fade from sight in ultimately inexplicable ways.

As its title suggests, Cobbler is about all kinds of making, and about the archetypal forces that connect the craftsperson’s labor to the universe-shaping mechanisms that bring the world into being. For Holloway, encounters with objects—whether in stores and workshops, galleries and museums, or the annals and dreams of civilizations past, present, and future—are also encounters with distant origins, far-off potentials, and mysteries at the heart of what is most familiar.