Traversing analog and digital spheres, Holland Hopson is an artist that is as generous as he is methodical. Hopson, an artist, musician, and composer, pulls from raw data, tradition, and simple but profound observations of the world. After chatting with Hopson and hearing him talk about his work, it makes the world feel bigger and more vivid. His work is imbued with a consideration and care that cuts through the dense and layered processes he weaves together, reflecting a world brighter and more sensitive than one can imagine.
Noah Reyes: Last I saw you, you were recording sounds of the bucket factory next to Stove Works. What kind of sounds are you recording these days?
Holland Hopson: I haven’t done a whole lot of recording since then because I’ve been sort of stuck inside most of the time. I’ve been going back and editing earlier stuff and listening back to things. The best recording from Stove Works was the hail storm. Hail hitting the windows and in the hallway. It’s a really great sound. I’m not sure what I’m going to use them for yet. A lot of those sounds are like sketches in a sketchbook. They’re keeping ears active and the imagination going.
NR: What first attracted you to working with sound as an artist?
HH: I came at it through music and as a musician. The world of musical sound is pretty restricted. If a visual art analogy can be made, it’s like saying the world of painting is only about painting still lives, right?
A really big thing was learning about contact microphones that allow me to record sounds that pass through solid objects rather than through air. It’s like looking through a microscope or a telescope. It’s a whole other world that opens up that you didn’t know was right there. The first time I put a contact mic on the branches of a tree while it was being blown in the wind, I could hear all the creaks and the rubbings and the stress of the material itself. It was a really big deal. I think the natural world, what is untouched by humans, and the sonic world is so engaging and wonderful.
When I’m in the middle of a really intense listening situation, making a recording with someone in rehearsal with a piece, I’ll walk outside and I’ll realize, “Oh, this is what it’s supposed to be like.” All this dimensionality, all this space, all of this texture. As much as I want that as part of my work, then I’ll go outside and I’ll realize that the world is doing my work better than I can do my work.
NR: How do you navigate moving between two-dimensional work and your sound work, and how might they overlap?
HH: I have a tendency to work with variation and multiples and repeated small things that turn into something larger. Modules and to work modularly. If I’m making drawings like my Loop Line Logics (2023) which is twenty-five drawings, it’s all smaller pieces that can be mixed and matched together. I don’t make operas. That’s just part of my practice and my DNA as an artist. My sound work is interactive. If you make this sound differently, the computer responds in a way that it didn’t before, or chamber music is set up so that the players are responding to each other and there’s agency.
My visual work does something similar. I’ll make a system software, an algorithm, and then tweak it. Each piece is one representation of a bigger world that it could be within. It’s about exploring the sandbox of possibilities that exist around this idea. It’s thinking about landscape, about space. Space is more important than narrative in my work. Texture is more important than narrative.
NR: Your work utilizes information pulled from databases. How do you think about databases and pulling from them within your work?
HH:. When I’m looking at a database, I’m interested in the ideas that are there in that database. If I Hate Fairyland, Feelings…. Fruits Basket, Plural (2024) explores the danger of banned books. Working that with that database means that I gesture the audience in the direction of thinking about censorship. With Average Color of the Sky (2022) and A Record of the Air From the Middle of a Cloud (2022), it’s about how to deal with air quality issueI was working with collaborators, Allison Grant and Karen Brummond, and we were all approaching this idea of air quality as a collaborative.How do we experience air quality? What does the sky look like and how does it change over time? Every day I’m collecting the colors of the sky, one every minute, with the average color of the sky for that minute.
I’m really interested in the ways databases organize our world. My piece with the Library of Congress’s subject database (A Work of Art for Every Entry in Index—Subjects—Library of Congress (2019)) is thinking more in terms of how information is organized, what it says about u how things are categorized that belong together. Data is all around and it’s all about what is counted and couldn’t quantify. Part of what I’m doing is pushing against that by saying, “Okay, this data is interesting, but it’s only interesting because we make it interesting or find it interesting.” How we count and quantify the world says something about where our priorities are and where our blinders are too. If everything is judged based on return on investment or stock price or the number of likes or based on whatever can be counted, then that changes the way that the world is understood.
