Reborn

2010 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
11:00 minutes

Desiree Holman

gender: female

nationality: American

Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct. The video features a group of women as they tenderly cradle lifelike baby dolls atop their rocking chairs. Although at first, the video might appear as a celebration of the maternal bond, the scene soon becomes eerie and unsettling as we see milk spilling out of the mothers’ mouths. Subsequently, the tone changes dramatically as a group of women in their underwear wearing colorful, bedazzled niqabs, perform an upbeat choreography with the dolls strapped around their bodies. The work is based on Holman’s research into the curious subculture of ‘reborners,’ a group of women known for hand-making, collecting and caring for hyper-realistic baby dolls called ‘reborns.’ Grounded in fantasy, the vernacular surrounding these dolls often addresses them as living. Fascinated by this, the dolls we see in Hollman’s video were created by the artist in a process that lasted over a year, which involved rooting each individual hair and painstakingly modeling their skin tones. Reborn is emblematic of Holman’s practice, which, through an anthropologic eye, aims at finding the fissures in established cultural tropes. As per other works by the artist , Reborn disrupts idyllic representations and conventions to bring to the fore the darker, strange and unsettling undertones of human nature.

Combining research, performance, video, digital manipulation, drawing, and installation, Desiree Holman’s multifaceted practice dissects the discourses that structure our shared experience of the social world: from ideas of gender and sexuality to notions of race and motherhood among many others. Originally trained as a sculptor, the Oakland-based artist places emphasis on objects due to their potential as repositories of meaning. With the help of performers, she then puts these objects to use as costumes or props in performances that the artist describes as “identity play-focused work.” Although Holman generally presents the performances as multi-channel videos, her oeuvre also incorporates traditional gallery works such as drawings and paintings, which a related to the videos on display. The source material informing her work is often based in her real-world research, pulling apart and interrogating social constructs she finds in popular culture and subcultures, in order to excavate social myths and illustrate the complexity of human psyche.