Holloway’s fourth solo show at The Approach, Post-process plunk, conducts a maverick enquiry into the dialectics of 20th century sculptural history. A hybrid title fusing two generations of thought, the terms reference sculpture ‘plunked’ into corporate plazas and public institutions without engaging their setting, and ‘process’ art’s subsequent reaction against it. ‘Post’ prods at the legacy of the process art movement- a growing sense of complacency towards the finely crafted sculptural object.

Comprised of bronze sculptures and a series of intaglio etchings, the show is premised upon the understanding that pre-existing knowledge about the mediums will be carried by the viewer into the gallery space, addressing the works as both the signifiers and result of the printing and bronze casting processes.

Double-David presents two halves of a mold made of a popular garden ornament sized replica of Michelangelo’s David. The recognizable image, appearing as both relief and counter-relief depending on the vantage point, is what makes an otherwise convoluted form legible. Using only the “front-side” of the mold, the two halves are stacked foot to foot, so that one is inverted. What is suggested is a double-inversion, both because one mold acts as a reflection of the other, and also because the mold is the inverted space of the familiar object.

Like Double David, the sculpture Two Brooms also presents a negative space formerly occupied by a familiar object repeated as rhythmic form in space. One object divided into two, the broom halves suggest the same movement performed by two actors simultaneously, a pas de deux frozen in time, and thus carry the association of camaraderie, or accord among absent or invisible persons.

Though Holloway’s bronze trees have been trained into unnatural 3-dimensional grid-like forms, our reading of them as sculptures is still heavily predicated upon our understanding of them as actual trees. Delicately balanced upon a single point in its lower half, the top segment of Balancing Tree bobs freely, bringing to mind the common association of branches swaying in breezes. Inverted Tree #2 also presents a tree branch reconfigured into a system of right angles and in this instance inverted, so that the direction of the branches points to the ground. The most delicate part of the tree is flipped to become a sculpture’s system of support- the tiniest tips of the branches seemingly growing into a less intricate and hefty trunk, defying the logic of nature but directing us to the strength of the bronze.

In Gates the scrap material of the foundry, bronze sprues and gates that are cut offs from the casting process, have been carefully reclaimed and presented as small sculptural abstractions on a mica table painted with a mysterious codified motif. Relying on the conventions of their scale, material, and shape, the works prove that the training for the appreciation of abstraction is highly manipulable, and small shifts of context complete the agreements about what objects carry as cultural agents.

The intaglio etchings, Smith from the Side, show us sketches of David Smith sculptures exhibited at the Cubes and Anarchy show at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011, but as seen in the side view. As with the bronzes, Holloway chooses an unorthodox way of presenting these iconic sculptures, but also employs an equally unorthodox way of presenting the final printed image, as the subject of the prints is actually just as much the sketchbook, spiral binding and all, in which these drawings were made. Here process and resolution find themselves once again engaged in a tug of war, they are simultaneously a resolutely finished edition of prints and revelation of the artist’s recording of ideas and influences within his practice.