MacKinnon does not reproduce the photographs as documentary records. Instead, she translates them into carefully structured pictorial spaces where memory, distance, and interpretation intersect.
Duran Contemporain is pleased to present How to Hold Hands, an exhibition of new paintings by Holly MacKinnon. Drawing from vernacular family photographs, MacKinnon approaches the domestic archive as both subject and method. The images that inform her paintings originate in private albums, often modest and unremarkable in their original context. Through the slow and deliberate process of painting, these fragments of personal history are reconsidered and given renewed presence.
MacKinnon does not reproduce the photographs as documentary records. Instead, she translates them into carefully structured pictorial spaces where memory, distance, and interpretation intersect. Cropping, shifts in scale, and the selective softening or sharpening of detail transform the original images. Figures appear suspended within quiet interiors or intimate gatherings, their gestures carrying a quiet emotional charge that exceeds the descriptive function of the source material.
The act of painting introduces a temporal gap between the moment the photograph was taken and the present moment of its rearticulation. In this space of delay, the images move away from the specificity of biography and begin to operate within a broader reflection on remembrance, intimacy, and the ways personal histories are constructed through images. Familiar gestures such as sitting together, touching, or simply sharing space acquire a heightened significance when viewed through the reflective surface of paint.
MacKinnon's restrained palette and attentive treatment of light contribute to an atmosphere of quiet concentration. Surfaces remain subtle and measured, allowing small shifts in tone and texture to carry much of the emotional weight of the compositions. The paintings invite a slower mode of looking in which the viewer becomes aware of the fragile distance that separates lived experience from its visual trace.
Within MacKinnon's work, the family photograph becomes more than a document of the past. It functions as a site where memory is continually reconstructed. By translating these images into paint, the artist creates a space in which private histories can be reconsidered, shared, and quietly reimagined.
