From Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles:

At this moment Mrs. Copperfield was strongly reminded of a dream that had recurred often during her life. She was being chased up a short hill by a dog. At the top of the hill there stood a few pine trees and a mannequin about eight feet high. She approached the mannequin and discovered her to be fashioned out of flesh, but without life. Her dress was of black velvet, and tapered to a very narrow width at the hem. Mrs. Copperfield wrapped one of the mannequin’s arms tightly around her own waist. She was startled by the thickness of the arm and very pleased. The mannequin’s other arm she bent upward from the elbow with her free hand. Then the mannequin began to sway backwards and forwards. Mrs. Copperfield clung all the more tightly to the mannequin and together they fell off the top of the hill and continued rolling for quite a distance until they landed on a little walk, where they remained locked in each other’s arms. Mrs. Copperfield loved this part of the dream best; and the fact that all the way down the hill the mannequin acted as a buffer between herself and the broken bottles and little stones over which they fell gave her particular satisfaction.

Taxter & Spengemann is pleased to present Nancy de Holl’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. She exhibits two intertwined bodies of photographic works on the first floor and in the upstairs office, which demonstrate a playfully perverse alternation between figure and object. De Holl’s episodic employment in the fashion photography industry insidiously influenced these two bodies of work, which reflect an attention to the sculptural, performative, and virtual operations present within the formulation of commercial imagery.

For the most recent work, de Holl hired a contortionist who came to the studio and posed for a series of elaborately styled shoots. In other photographs, subjects are embodied from a highly curated selection of found and sometimes mundane materials. Nancy de Holl lives and work is New York. Her previous exhibition at Taxter & Spengemann titled Anywhere Out of the World, was in March 2005. Since that time she has been included in group exhibitions such as: Bunch Alliance and Dissolve, curated by Public Holiday Projects, at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; A Stone’s Throw from the Orphanage, Wallspace, NY; Put It In Your Mouth/I’ll See You on the Dark Side of the Prune, curated by Darren Bader, Rivington Arms, New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of California Los Angeles.