Selachimorpha: Hybodontiformes
Joey Holder is a visual artist, producer, mentor who creates fictional worlds & constructed environments that respond directly to contemporary, real world events. Her artwork is fuelled by continued dialogue and collaborations with researchers & practitioners from varied fields. Each artwork is considered a ‘set’ with filmic, narrative, architectural, visuals & sound elements created uniquely for the conceptual underpinning of the project. She has worked with computational geneticists, marine biologists, behavioural psychologists, and investigative journalists where Holder’s artwork has addressed themes including future farming, synthetic biology and deep sea ecosystems. Joey Holder’s work raises philosophical questions of our universe and things yet unknown, regarding the future of science, medicine, biology and human-machine interactions. Connecting forms which have emerged through our human taste, culture and industrial processes she investigates complex systems that dissolve notions of the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’. GM products, virtual biology and aquatic creatures are incorporated into an extended web; challenging our perception of evolution, adaptation and change. Joey Holder has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 6th Athens Biennale (2018), Design Museum (London), The Photographers’ Gallery (London, 2017), Transmediale (Berlin), Venice Biennale and many more. Her work has been covered in ARTFORUM, Art Monthly, DAZED DIGITAL, Elephant, Flash Art, Frieze, The Guardian, It’s Nice That, Rhizome, Time Out, and VICE.
For the Selachimorpha project Joey Holder used a specific scene from the movie Jaws (1975) as a starting point to see how manipulated images are appropriated and disseminated by Internet culture as “fact”. The scene where a shooting star flashes behind the back of the Roy Scheider character became the trigger for the emergence of conspiracy theories. The ease of adaptation and subsequent dissemination of images such as deserts, outer space and oceans provides a rich breeding ground for fiction and imagination. The project was named as the scientific classification of sharks (modern sharks are a group of plate-gill fish of the Selachimorpha (Selachii) class). This project exists between actual and fictional images, symbols, and memes; making the ever-changing belief systems we use to define our world explicit.
