“I’m an artist who works with movement as the main medium, whether or not it manifests itself in a type of performance or an installation or objects or video is determined along the way of the process,” explained Madeline Hollander in 2018. While movement is the form she sculpts, “It’s not dance, it’s definitely more in the realm of installation and things that are durational.” Hollander’s installation Flatwing is now at the Whitney, and it’s as much a return to childhood insect collecting as it is a conceptual exploration. The term “flatwing” is used for crickets in Hawaii that can no longer chirp. An evolutionary development that protects the crickets from a parasitic fly, which locates them through their mating call, this silence is, in Hollander’s words, “a choreography of survival.” In her video installation, she attempts to find flatwings in Hawaii’s rainforest at night. It is poetry without song, a quest without clues. —L.J.
The Arts Intel Report
Madeline Hollander: Flatwing
When
Mar 25 – Aug 8, 2021
Where
Etc
Madeline Hollander, “Flatwing,” 2019. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Madeline Hollander.