“Dan Schapiro’s HOLEPLAY is a display case of colorful, florid, feverish pain, coming to us in reds and blues of regret, betrayal, deceit, pitiless humiliation, and boyfriend problems, all delivered with a lush and elegant pop sensibility.
The range entailed by all the phrases and pictures covers so many various feelings, calls us to fight for so many buried activisms, and makes it possible to experience so many ‘melismatic insomnias’ that, apparently, we were already living through.
Historical and sexual metaphors galore, a digression on an Arabic root, misshapen words and lines, ghostly pictures of phones and roads; the vertiginous and the right-here-in-front-of-you, the righteously expansive and the claustrophobic-comedic edge, the musical references and the real-life-story autopoiesis:
‘the work is cold::the cold in turn works ... just go, take my breath away.’ It makes you cry, it is elegiac, but extravagantly so.”
- Zamaan Hashmi
