Holladay Saltz: The Twisting of a Dove

Sibyl presents The Twisting of a Dove, an exhibition by Holladay Saltz in which the artist embeds her painting and drawing practice within a layered, fictional narrative that rewards patient and curious visitors.

Saltz's paintings line the walls, but the exhibition's center of gravity is a writing desk strewn with documents. Through this staged archive, Saltz introduces Helige Todd, an East German-American poet who left her hometown of Jena for New York City in 1988, the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The desk holds the contents of a found archive–diary, letters, photographs, drawings, and poems– in which fabricated materials are woven together with genuine historical documents, publications, and correspondence. Visitors are free to handle the evidence and draw their own conclusions.

The documents point to an uncertain identity and a troubling history with the East German Ministry for State Security–commonly known as the Stasi–who infamously used physical and psychological intimidation and torture techniques to exercise a high degree of control over the population. While establishing herself in New York, Todd’s book of poetry, The Erlking, won the 1997 Yale Younger Poets Prize. As the secrets of the East German surveillance state and the people implicated in them began surfacing in the Western press, Todd mysteriously and unexpectedly withdrew her manuscript, rejected the prize, and followed her matrilineal history back to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There, she assumed an anonymous life: a derelict property, a community-college teaching job, an earthen mass visible from her windows she came to call the Burial Mound. The ghosts of her past found her anyway. She disappeared quietly in the spring of 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina destroyed the region and swallowed whatever remained of her story. A single-channel video draws on archival footage to give partial, flickering form to what the desk can only imply: Todd speaking, seen, and present, though never resolved into certainty.

Saltz structures the exhibition as a cento, an ancient form in which a poem is assembled from the lines of existing works. The poems in Helige's prize-winning book, written and printed in full by Saltz for the exhibition, are themselves centos; Saltz’s paintings are centos of Todd’s “found” sketches; the narrative itself is a cento of fiction and historical fact. The elements nest like matryoshka dolls, with an uncertainty at the center that never fully crystalizes.

The show turns on a question that extends well beyond its fictional frame: how do people–or peoples, cultures, nations–use narrative to make the past livable? How do we massage history into a shape we can tolerate? As Saltz draws viewers into a story where every object carries its own doubt, she asks us to consider how data, facts, and memory can be quietly rearranged to accommodate a more convenient truth.