Detumescence is a vanitas installation consisting of works from Soft Computing (a sculpture series of hardware plushies), real technologies, flowers, fruits, and a GIF. The piece was made during lockdown and in response to personal and global grief experienced remotely, through technology and the screen. As a re-staging of a classic memento mori tableau, it is updated to include technologies at different ‘life’ stages: functional, obsolete, and reimagined as plushies. At a moment when nearly all human interaction and life was collapsing onto technology–even funerals–Detumescence acts as a memorial to lives lost.

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Bio

Faith Holland is an artist, curator, critic, and educator whose multimedia practice focuses on gender, intimacy, and technology. In works that exaggerate our physical and embodied relationships to technologies, Holland uses equal measures of humor and tenderness in sculpture, performance, video, animated gifs, and net art works. She has exhibited at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), NRW Forum (Düsseldorf), Fotografisk Center (Copenhagen), and DAM Gallery (Berlin). Her work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times UK, Hyperallergic, and The Observer. She has been a NYFA Fellowship Finalist in Digital/Electronic Art, an artist-in-residence at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning and Harvestworks, and a finalist for Fotomuseum Winterthur’s Post-Photography Prototyping Prize. She opened Hard/Soft, her third solo exhibition with TRANSFER, online and offline in 2020 as well as Touchscreen at L’Unique in Caen, France.