Madeline Hollander

Madeline Hollander is an American artist, choreographer, and dancer, living and working in New York City.[1] Her work explores the evolution of human body movement and the intersection between choreography and visual art.[2]

Madeline Hollander
Born
U.S.A
EducationBarnard College of Columbia University, Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts
Websitewww.madelinehollander.com

Early life and education

Madeline Hollander was born in 1986 in Los Angeles, California. She trained with Yvonne Mounsey while growing up in Los Angeles[3] and she danced professionally with the Los Angeles Ballet and with Angel Corella’s Barcelona Ballet.[4] She received a Bachelor's Associates degree from Barnard College of Columbia University in 2008 and attended the MFA program at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts from 2016 to 2019.[5]

Artistic practice

Madeline Hollander is an intense observer of everyday gestures. Hollander's work investigates the body's ability to communicate and respond to the limits within everyday systems. Since 2013, Hollander has been adding to Gesture Archive, a long-term research project that surveys expressive human movement in all its variety.[4] She uses performance and dance to communicate how a space in contemporary art can be experienced rather than space being a reaction to the art object.[2] These dances and performances are unlike the ballets Hollander danced growing up. The movements often reflect her observations of gesture and emulate the everyday. Benjamin Millepied, the artistic director of L.A. Dance Project and a former New York City Ballet principal, said “there’s a clear understanding of classical craft when it comes to the architecture of her dances."[3] Hollander’s fascination with systems goes beyond repeating existing systems. She is also constructing systems of her own. They often involve placing the body in conversation with various contexts, such as molecular or mechanical arrangements. Along with creating choreography, Hollander has developed a more intuitive and organic system of color codes and pictographs to recall her movements. “The drawings are only meant to be understood by me and the dancers. It’s a system for recall. To remind the bodies who already lived through the movements.”[6] As well as creating a rich amount of her own work, Hollander also collaborates as a choreographer with other artists.[7] She made her first step into Hollywood, hired as a movement consultant and choreographer to Jordan Peele’s “Us.” She helped to develop physical vocabularies for the characters’ dueling selves.[3] She was also apart of Helsinki Contemporary's "Future Delay", a show curated by New York based curator Amanda Schmitt, where she, Pearla Pigao, and Hans Rosenström were commissioned to explore the future potential of technological immortality.[8] Regardless of who Hollander is collaborating with she consistently creates new ways of drawing her choreography's vocabulary from many sources, from the interaction of interface design (Illegal Motion, 2015);[9] sports referee gestures (Mile, 2016);[10] and building evacuation procedures (Drill, 2016).[11]

Heads/Tails

Hollander's work "Heads/Tails" is her first major exhibition without human actors. The installation consists of hundreds of used automobile headlights and taillights, covering opposite walls of the gallery, synched with the traffic signal at the nearby intersection of Walker Street and Broadway.[12] Breaking cars driving on Walker Street trigger the installation’s taillights resulting in their illumination. These results are modeled after the behaviors of various types of New York City drivers and the installations car lights turn off again when the street light changes to green. At sunset the headlights in the installation change to the "brights" setting and at sunrise they will revert to a “fog light” setting in a nonstop, 24/7 cycle. Alongside the installation of car lights, Hollander shows a series of watercolors that mirror the pictographs she uses to help her and her dancers recall their movements. However these watercolors, while seemingly abstract have the capacity to signify the featured movement sequences, detailed drawings of hand gestures, and multicolored circles that function as graphemes. These works remind viewers of the correlation between the city and the body constantly circulating with a heartbeat. A text by A.E. Benenson accompanies the exhibition. The text addresses the history of New York City traffic and its regulation of movement vis-a-vis concepts of progress, performance and order. It is presented alongside a small bronze statue of Mercury, one of the 104 that adorned the tops of traffic lights along Fifth Avenue from 1931-1964, and have since largely gone missing.[12]

New Max

As in all of Hollander’s other work to date, the dancers’ choreography references or “cites” everyday physical activities. The project notes for "New Max" describe the installation's "Performance begins at 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and dancers continuously hit a new maximum temperature each round."[13] The starting temperature in the room is 65 degrees Fahrenheit as this is the museum standard for storing works of art. The choreography is a series of scripted movements that create body heat, raising the room’s temperature to 85 degrees. This change in room temperature takes place over a series of sixteen rounds. Each round with a new min and max temp and the goal of Round 1 is to get to 70 degrees, triggering the A/C units to turn on and cool the room. This begins round to at a starting temperature of 66 degrees. As this pattern continues, two Dancers track their progress by the room’s lights. They are attached to a temperature sensor and become brighter as the room heats up. When the temperature hits the maximum, the lights turn out, the A/C units on, and the dancers rest. As soon as the minimum is reached again, the dancers are back in motion.[4]

Performances and choreography

Grants, residencies and awards
  • 2015 - Fountainhead Studios Artist Residency, Miami, FL[2]
  • 2015 - Choreographic Coding Lab: Motion-Bank, Center for the Art of Performance, UCLA[25]
  • 2015 - Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture[17]
  • 2016 - Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship[26]

References
  1. "Studio Visit: Madeline Hollander by Mikkel Rosengaard - BOMB Magazine". bombmagazine.org.
  2. "Madeline Hollander". The Fountainhead.
  3. Burke, Siobhan (17 September 2019). "At the Whitney Biennial, Flood Preparation as Social Dance". New York Times.
  4. "Madeline Hollander". The Artist's Institute.
  5. "CV/Contact". Madeline Hollander.
  6. Rosengaard, Mikkal (21 September 2018). "Studio Visit: Madeline Hollander by Mikkel Rosengaard". BOMB Magazine.
  7. Greenberger, Alex (26 March 2019). "A Dance for Two: Artist Madeline Hollander on Working with Jordan Peele to Choreograph His Film 'Us'". ARTnews.
  8. Jeffreys, Tom (10 August 2019). "Are We Choreographing Machines, Or Are They Choreographing Us?". Frieze.
  9. "Illegal Motion". Madeline Hollander.
  10. "Mile". Madeline Hollander.
  11. "Drill". Madeline Hollander.
  12. "BORTOLAMI-Madeline Hollander-Heads/Tails Press Release" (PDF). Bortolami Gallery.
  13. Schwendener, Martha (1 March 2018). "What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week". New York Times.
  14. "Madeline Hollander Edition". JOAN.
  15. "Futurevisions". Torrance Shipman.
  16. "Elizabeth Jaeger - Exhibitions - Jack Hanley Gallery". www.jackhanley.com.
  17. "Madeline Hollander (A '15)". Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
  18. "In Practice: Under Foundations". www.sculpture-center.org.
  19. "Artist Madeline Hollander Sees Choreography All Around Us". Cultured Magazine. 12 December 2017.
  20. "Who is choreographing whom?". Gagosian Quarterly. 7 September 2018.
  21. "Madeline Hollander". The Artists Institute.
  22. "Urs Fischer: PLAY with choreography by Madeline Hollander, West 21st Street, New York, September 6–October 13, 2018". Gagosian. 17 August 2018.
  23. Bradley, Laura. "How Men in Black, Get Out, and Meryl Streep Inspired Us's Climactic Fight". HWD.
  24. "Whitney Museum Announces 2019 Biennial Participants, But One Artist Withdraws". Hyperallergic. 2019-02-26. Retrieved 2019-04-08.
  25. Palop, Benoit (22 September 2015). "Dance Meets Cutting Edge Digital Creativity at an LA Workshop". Creators.
  26. "Madeline Hollander". Socrates Sculpture Park. 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
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