The$Aesthe(cs$of$Exhibi(onism$ - Arcadia Missa

What is interesting about Holly’s aesthetic language is the understanding of the
image in it’s materiality – often her sculptures contain printed out photos
sellotaped, as if laminating them into objecthood (in the traditional sense of the
word), for me this further translates as a pushing into view, of the materiality of the
digital image.
Holly White’s aesthetic could be described as low-res. Although probably using the
same tools as other artists whose work appears as ‘high res’, there is a certain
aesthetic language, which acts to engage with her peers on the platforms she uses,
who are perhaps not artists. Or maybe Holly White’s low-res can be understood as
a rejection of capitalist aesthetics, but for Holly I feel it is fairer to say that she
makes work in the way she chooses, directly bound with her life, her friendships, her
own interests and aesthetic taste.
Holly’s images are made by Holly, as opposed to ripped or appropriated, as low-res
also connotes. Low-res as a term has gained a certain aura – one that supposes a
form of image democracy, or political potency, in particular though Hito Steyerl’s
text ‘In defense of the poor image’; in the opening paragraph of this text, she
states:
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As
it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an
errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital
connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and
pasted into other channels of distribution.
The poor image here is pitted as an image in constant becoming; the political
immanence of this type of image is gestured by Steyerl at the end of the text, with
the words:
The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and
alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and
stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect.
The circulation of poor images thus initiates another chapter in the historical
genealogy of nonconformist information circuits