The Couple 2, 60 x 123 inches on paper oil stick, fire, pencil, conte crayon, chalk, wash 2022
LAS Contemporary is pleased to present Love and Maps, a solo exhibition by Holly Knox Rhame.
In this new body of work, Rhame continues her exploration of what she terms “biograms”—a concept borrowed from Gilles Deleuze describing a diagram or map of the environmental, psychological, biological, and social topographies that shape a being. Working primarily on paper, Rhame constructs visual cartographies of relational existence, charting the unstable and ever-shifting terrain of becoming.
At the center of Love and Maps is the symbolic couple—figures poised at the threshold of what is possible. They function not as portraits of individuals, but as sites of tension and projection, embodiments of desire, rupture, attachment, and individuation. Each composition unfolds as a kind of visual “talking cure,” tracing the psychic and emotional contours that bind and divide us.
Holly Knox Rhame: Love and Maps
Grounded in fracture and juxtaposition, Rhame’s process incorporates a dynamic lexicon of materials: washes suggest fluidity and dissolution; oil stick becomes the flesh of the body; iron oxide evokes the magnetic pull of memory and fantasy. Fire and burning act as transformative gestures—raw material “cooked” into culture—while collage conceals and reveals, creating hidden spaces where underlying drives are masked yet persist. The works emerge as layered assemblages, charged with both vulnerability and resistance.
In Love and Maps, Rhame pushes at the boundaries of the possible, inviting viewers to consider whether fragments of the impossible—within love, within the self—might in fact be attainable.
The couple a model, 60 x 82 inches on paper, Graphite, oil stick, water, soluble graphite, colored, pencil, collage, fire, 2024
The couple as a knot
120 x 123 inches on paper
Water soluble graphite, graphite, oil stick, iron
oxide, pencil
2024
The couple as interpenetrating frames
60 x 82 inches on paper, Oil stick, wash, graphite,
charcoal, iron oxide, collage, fire, conte crayon
2024
Detail of The couple as interpenetrating frames
The Couple 3 60 x 123 inches on paper oil stick, wash, fire, conte crayon, crayon, pencil 2022
The couple in a garden with the unknown
120 x 123 inches on paper
Oil stick, wash, graphite, collage, fire, colored, pencil, conte crayon
2024
The Dance 2, 30 x 44 inches on paper, Oil stick, pencil, crayon, conte crayon, wash 2022
Detail of The Dance 2
The couple who desire each other and the unknown (scale up), 120 x 123 inches on paper, Oil stick, collage, fire, mirror paper, conte crayon, colored pencil, wash, graphite, charcoal, Iron oxide, 2024
The couple as curves and frames
60 x 82 inches on paper,Oil stick, graphite, colored
graphite, wash, conte
crayon, collage, fire, iron oxide, charcoal
2024
Detail of The couple as curves and frames