Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
‘Empathy is the great conqueror of strife’
IN exploring the theme of history, Brent Holmes uses diverse media.
“I can say that the primary body of my work from 2015 until now addresses all of the issues extant in the current civil unrest,” Holmes says.
For a recent show, he built a water fountain out of ceramic and steel, provided an activated charcoal face mask and invited visitors to rub the black scrub into their skin while music by a black composer played.
Holmes titled the project “Clotilda,” named after the last slave ship to land on U.S. soil.
The idea was to provide a recursive experience for the audience. What if, by wearing blackface, a person were granted black consciousness and the perceptions, anxieties and difficulties that blacks experience?
The project is one way that Holmes investigates empathy in his work.
“Empathy is the great conqueror of strife,” Holmes says. “It is the purest form of human intimacy. Understanding another person’s perception is a powerful manifestation of love.”
The job of an artist is to be an “internaut,” Holmes says. While the role of an astronaut is to explore what lies beyond, an artist’s job is to explore within, he says.
“Our job is to go in and dig around in there, then bring what we find out into the world and describe it as accurately as possible,” he says.
Holmes has attended several Black Lives Matter protests in Las Vegas as a photographer for Nevada Public Radio. He has not yet created art in response to that movement, but he expects to develop a piece with the performance art organization he co-founded, Radar, after having had time to process.
He says he has perceived performance art within the protests themselves.
“At one of the protests, there was a line of police, and protesters were kneeling and asking the police why they wouldn’t join them,” Holmes recalls. “That’s what a lot of performance art looks like, a series of actions that confront an idea.”