CULTIVATE is pleased to present an artist talk by Amy Holiday whose current creative process investigates how a place interacts with the sky. Driven by her interest in experiencing the sky in new locations and weighing the environmental factors that impact its appearance, she collects twilight, sky, and moon imagery. Field Notes From Italian Twilight references the observations and field research made during her stay in Montegiovi (GR), Italy as a La Baldi Resident artist.
Holiday starts by finding a view of an expansive sky. She takes a photo every twenty seconds for an hour after sunset. From this collection of 180 images, she selects a subset. Sometimes she rearranges, rotates, and crops the images, but otherwise does not alter them. In some pieces she takes a slice from multiple images and combines them into one, but they always remain faithful documents reflecting the specific conditions of place and sky.
“I use the element of time to create a container for vast spaces and shrink the sense of self,” says Holiday. “The final images become a story of the sky for one hour on a given day.”
About the Artist: Holiday grew up under the big skies of Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico. After earning a Bachelor of Science in Geography from Northern Arizona University in 1996, she moved to Maryland to map sea ice for the Navy. She discovered she couldn’t sit at a desk and tried several professions before getting a job building crates for artwork. Her own artistic investigation began shortly thereafter.
“In 2016 I quit my job at the Denver Art Museum,” says Holiday. “To celebrate the journey into the unknown, I bought a camera. I gave up most of my belongings and wandered for 4 years in the U.S. and Mexico taking photos, mostly of the moon and the sky.“ In 2022 she returned to Maryland to reunite with the community centered around Red Dirt Studio in Mt. Rainier, Maryland where she currently creates work about the sky and builds art crates.
About CULTIVATE: Cultivate is an evolving collection of interdisciplinary artists, writers, and researchers driven by investigations of land, place, and the commons. Projects include experimental and practical art explorations that wrestle with the qualities, perceptions, and layers of experience that inform and expand notions of landscape. Ideas from a full spectrum of voices across generations are supported using sustainable tactics. From the hyper-local to the global, Cultivate reflects individual and collective curiosity, intention, imagining, and engagement with the phenomena of landscape.
Cultivate’s La Baldi Residency assembles artists, writers, and researchers from around the world in the small village of Montegiovi, Italy for interdisciplinary investigations of land, place, and the commons. The residency honors the legacy of Maura Baldi for whom education, exchange, and sustainable, environmental stewardship were imperatives. The residency supports space and time for individuals and collaborations.
Cultivate’s project locations include virtual and analog locations in watersheds around the globe with physical bases in the Washington, D.C. metro area, Montana, and Italy.
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