Displayed over three channels simultaneously, the piece begins with stifled re-enactments of both sitcoms. Voiceless actors portray each character with unsettling familiarity, sporting semi-recognizable face masks like sheets of skin from the personal collection of Hannibal Lecter. On the left screen, we see the Connors lounging about in their filthy living room and then begrudgingly cleaning the mess. On the right, the Huxtables are dealing with a typical “Cosby Show” predicament: the kids try to hide the lamp that they’ve carelessly broken with the toss of a football. Eventually, both families meet in the center screen and find themselves transported to a Matrix-esque nowhere place, where, surrounded by an ectoplasmic glow, they earnestly engage in the rave of the millenium. Finally, they’re sent back to their separate living room universes, gazing dead-eyed into their televisions for some quality family time.

Holman’s body of work hovers around the idea of performance in familial relationships. In Art as Therapy, she recreates a real life family from an arbitrary daytime talk show with a series of life-size dolls, which she then uses to act out a family therapy session, voicing each character herself. Bucolic Life is a series of staged snapshots starring Holman as the flesh-and-blood matriarch of a family unit that’s otherwise comprised of mannequin substitutes for the real thing. Even her atypical works, like Troglodyte, which features a group of actors in chimpanzee outfits, tend to ruminate on the questionable sanctity of familial bonds: a still photo from the project portraying a chimp family embracing each other on a warm hillside bears the skeptically clinical title Reciprocal Altruism.

Reciprocal Altruism

The feeling Holman’s work instills within her viewers arises from a deep, dark well of human history, provoking an exciting sense of unease. She’s placing primordial instincts within contemporary contexts: mining the uncanny valley and forcing her audience to ask questions about the source of their own emotions in the midst of electronic dance songs and pop culture references. After meeting Ms. Holman at Machine Project‘s opening of The Magic Window, I was lucky enough to engage with her in an e-mail interview. Read on to learn more about humanity’s evolving definition of family, the collaborative experience behind The Magic Window, and those menacing, magnificent masks.

What’s happened to the American family in pop culture? Sure, we’ve had heavy fare like “The Sopranos,” and “The Simpsons” never seems to end, but how are there no Huxtables nor Connors in the Bush era?

This is a really fascinating question. I’m not qualified to answer this question though. I will comment that the Huxtables and Connors portray sincere, cohesive, loving family units with little cynicism toward family bonds.

What is the process like for designing and creating those frighteningly distorted– yet strangely uncanny masks in The Magic Window?

For prior projects in which I used masking, the masks were made of flexible latex which could be stretched to fit different performers. For The Magic Window, I had a smaller budget for the sculpture making process, so I ended up making the first prototype using a combination of canvas and clay. I sewed a canvas mask for the head and sculpted facial features on top of the fabric. Understand that clay, once hardened, is rigid. Furthermore, it cracks. I quickly realized that I would have to choose performers to play each character months before production because I would be making a mask that would fit only THAT specific performer.

Due to the nature of the materials, the masks ended up being a compromise between the facial structure of the original actor and the facial structure of the performer in The Magic Window. For example, the performer that played Theo Huxtable’s character has a long nose while Malcolm Jamal Warner, the original actor, has a flat, wide nose, so the sculpture is an amalgamation between the two bone structures. The distorted mask portraits serve as reflexive props pointing back to the performer and the psychology of the game being experienced. The distortion is part of what makes the viewer question what they are seeing; the uncanny keeps it familiar and, therefore, of concern.

Still from The Magic Window.

You’ve produced work before that seems almost entirely D.I.Y., such as Art as Therapy, in which you operate the puppets, give them your voice, play a live action role, and presumably manage everything behind the scenes. That piece, as well as Bucolic Life, seem to ruminate on the notion that all the characters in a narrative are really just the product of one author having a conversation with herself in her head. That’s not the case in The Magic Window– you’ve shifted the style of your production by incorporating a sizable cast and crew. How did it affect your process to work within a more typical filmmaking community of collaborators?

Most of my early work featured myself and a bunch of figurative sculptures that I would animate. Troglodyte (2005) was the first project in which the focal point did not directly reference back to me, the artist, in the tradition of Body Art. I also worked with a cast of performers and a production crew on Troglodyte though that wasn’t the first time working a group for me. Recently I’ve become most interested in working with a group of performers in order to create a dynamic conversation amongst multiple inputs.

While it is true that the projects have moved into working “within a more typical filmmaking community of collaborators,” it is also true that some D.I.Y. aspects are retained. This is a testament to the fact that I coming to video-making from a background in sculpture and conceptual art, which historically has championed the D.I.Y. over the slick.

Who is your ideal pop culture family, if any? Does your definition of the family in cultural narratives extend to artificial family groups, like the irrevocably bonded ladies of “Sex and the City,” for instance?

My ideal pop culture families are the Huxtables and the Connors of course! I don’t have a fixed definition of family. I’m not sure if I would identify the main women protagonists in SATC as family or not. Perhaps that’s up the characters to decide. Certainly, most of us create significant attachments to others that resemble a family model. It’s the way of the homo sapiens.

The subjects of your nostalgic appropriation, “Roseanne” and “The Cosby Show,” represent in some ways the end of a long tradition of family-oriented sitcoms. Do you think the current generation of children, growing up in highly individualized niche markets, with the Internet and the solipsistic tools of self-documentation at their disposal, will diverge from their predecessors’ understanding of community and family?

Yes. Each generation will be shaped by the surrounding cultural values which in some cases may be radically divergent from previous generations. Online communities or gay marriage and gay families are two examples of our changing understanding of community and family. Of course, much has been said about feminism, replacement birth levels and changes in nuclear familiar structure over the years.

How was race important for you in staging The Magic Window? Was it a premeditated decision that several of the actors would be noticeably different skin colored than the sitcom characters they were portraying?

Some of the performers who I worked with chose the characters they wanted to portray; some I asked to portray a specific character. In other words, the outcome is a combination of both a directorial agenda and the performers’ own visions. On both accounts, some of the decisions where made on the basis of ethnic identity. For example, it was important to have a diverse cast as the work should bear some relationship on American demographics and the truth of those TV families: affluent and African-American & working class and Caucasian. Whether you are directly represented in either of those demographics or not, if you were a viewer of these original sitcoms, you might have wondered (even unconsciously) where you fit in this continuum. In The Magic Window, the performers engaged in a fictional identity workshop where there was not a strict script to stay true to who one might be outside of the mask. This caused some performers to make unexpected decisions about who they might play.

Still from The Magic Window.

In your project statement, you note that The Magic Window combines the styles of “American sitcom television production and D.I.Y. video art sensibility.” Do you think it’s possible for video art to reach a mainstream audience, and if so, is that something that would appeal to you as an artist? Who’s your ideal audience?

I certainly think that video art has the potentially to reach a mainstream audience. At this point, I am most focused on an audience that is specifically seeking contemporary art, but that might change or expand in time. I am heavily invested in the language and culture of contemporary art.

Can you give us any hint on what we might see from you next? Also, what’s your dream project?

Mixing the antiquated aesthetic of its source material (Frank Wedekind‘s 1891 play of the same name, which was frequently banned in both Germany and America for its no holds barred look at youth) with folk-tinged alternative rock numbers, Spring Awakening updates the original play’s themes of sexual discovery, anti-establishment frustrations, child abuse, and the crushing guilt of religion for contemporary audiences. The result is an intimate and universally identifiable depiction of the battlefield that is puberty. Much more convincingly than Sofia Coppola’s similarly anachronistic Marie Antoinette, the play flattens its mix of stylings from the past and the present into a seamless continuum of heightened teenage angst that feels universal.

Hideaki Anno’s classic anime series “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” which deals with similar themes (albeit, in an entirely different context) is what first came to mind as an accurate point of comparison for Spring Awakening. On the surface, they share little in common: “Evangelion” is an epic sci-fi soap opera about a timid junior high student who’s chosen to pilot an enormous fighting machine. Along the way, he copes with a callous, domineering father, his terrifying sexual compulsions, and the internal pressures of adolescence. Giant robot battles and dazzling Broadway choreography aside, both “Evangelion” and Spring Awakening go where few contemporary tales of teen life go, addressing heavy philosophical issues, sexual confusion, and alienation from societal mores– all under the pretext of a pop culture spectacle.

This is my final issue of Mean as associate editor, as I’ve decided to go freelance and focus my concentration on writing (and acting, and filmmaking… I’m just putting editorial work on the sidelines, for now). I’ve got four articles in the issue, including interviews with Six Feet Under/True Blood creator, Alan Ball; the talented and beautiful Summer Bishil, who stars in Ball’s latest feature film, Towelhead; and Scott McMicken– the lead singer of my favorite band in the world, Dr. Dog (whose conversation was so ramblingly awesome and captivating that I posted the leftover bits here). Also, I wrote the column about sneakers and which ones you should buy to craft your consumer identity, but in a fun way!