ARTIST DRIVES

​Kendrew Quad Gallery, St. John’s College, Oxford
2019

Main Gallery: Gas Tank City
​For 50 years Andrew Holmes has pursued the trucks, trailers, tanks and highways of the American West in a series of 150 identically sized drawings. His most favoured subject matter has always been Los Angeles, or rather the lines of transportation that artificially sustain the city across the harsh surrounding desert. The concatenation of mobile structures on the American highway, trucks, trailers, and tanks with their permanent industrial armature, which channels, fills, fuels, unloads, washes, is for him the great architecture of America. Its configurations exist in recurrent process rather than stasis. The core of the work is a series of large drawings in seamless layers of Derwent colour pencil, works in which time unfolds retrospectively through the viewer’s awakening to the sustained intensity of labour, and feeling that gave rise to them.    

Lobby: Full Beam
Two graphite pencil drawings from a new series that
describe driving at night in the American landscape.

Lecture Space: Route 99
Colour prints of storage structures along Route 99 that runs north from Calexico through Los Angeles then via Bakersfield, and Fresno to Sacramento.

Smaller Gallery: Progress
John Bunyan’s book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, of 1678 describes in a dream the trials of a man through his life. Less well known is the second part, the trials of Pilgrim’s wife. Progress is a retelling of her experience. In this version she is re-imagined as a female private detective in California. She drives rather than walks. She enters not through the wicket gate but via the camera. The journey commences not on The Path but The Highway. She encounters her trials on the roads she drives, the Slough of Despond becomes La Cienega, Mount Clear becomes Montclair, Castle Despair becomes John Pipes, until she finally reaches the Celestial City, an unlit enclosed parking space.