Lonnie Holley The Weight of Everything at JAMES FUENTES

James Kalm has been intrigued with the idea of “Outsider Art”, or art from the margins since his hippie days in the late 1960s. Although the spectrum and definition of outsiders varies from the naïve, to the mentally ill, visionary, uncontaminated and children’s art, your correspondent has tried to keep an own mind and a sharp eye out for works and artists of interest. In 2009, at the invitation of Matt Arnett, James Kalm made a video tour and conducted an interview with Matt’s father the celebrated collector Bill Arnett https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OK0w... . It was during this encounter that your reporter first saw a substantial selection of Lonnie Holley’s works. Using mostly found objects both manmade and natural like wire, cast off mechanical parts and roots, Holley combines these objects by binding elements together and structuring the connections vie an intuitive poetic sense that give the works their own imbedded talismanistic meaning. Holley is concerned with mankind’s ravenous and unconscious consumption, and he sees his use of the discarded and abject leftovers as a way of studying the nature of our current predicament, and using this debris as a salve for healing. This program was recorded September 20, 2017.