Holly Streekstra

The Tatting Tale
mixed media, CD player

I seek to establish intimate associations between the viewer and the work by using materials that are seemingly dissimilar, often familiar, and that derive from multiple origins. These constructions are at once affective, charmed with details and curiosity. My work confronts psychological identity, exposes cultural and social myths and dares the inhibitions of the viewer, instigating playful interactions in the gallery. Much of my work reinvents feminist images and evokes further inquiries into cultural values surrounding sexuality, sexual expression, desire, and tensions and conflicts in sexual self-understanding.

Both entertaining and challenging, my work uses old and new archetypes from mixed media. By reusing and reorganizing kitsch, flea market Americana and other familiar domestic imagery, I assemble and collage information so that it reemerges in a unique context. Sardonic humor, irony, the macabre and poetry are operatives in allegories that contain bytes of contemporary pop culture mixed with nostalgia.

Through a stimuli of words, images and sounds, metaphors and associations all plucked (cut, pasted, edited) from the stuff of our collective cultural memory, prominent cultural archetypes exist, no longer as received ideas, but as a bold entertainments.

© Holly Streekstra