Juxtapoz Journal – Alex Olson and the Essential Construction of “Spines”


Josh Lilley is happy to current, Spines, Alex Olson’s (b. 1978, Boston, MA) first solo exhibition with the gallery. Over the previous decade, Alex Olson has made perceptually advanced work that ask how we perceive what we see. She early on thematized acts of studying and interpretation by means of asemic stand-ins for written texts, after which more and more used the trope of the stroke or calligraphic line to speak how paint is concurrently materials and a method of signification. She likewise has described the usage of visible velocity bumps to decelerate apprehension of the entire composition, or to dislodge one from the convenience of getting a fast look conform to unconscious behavior. In her performs of sample recognition but additionally disambiguation, she creates frames for these epistemic processes. Her new works offered in Spines—inclusive of the most important made up to now—present Olson shifting from questioning aloud, visually, about preconceptions to the boundaries of data and the way it’s acquired within the first place.

Spines right here reference books, but additionally our bodies, and particularly these of Olson and her new child daughter. The backbone serves as a structuring gadget all through. It originated with an ultrasound imaging her daughter, and serves as a metonym for the presence of one other, but additionally keys to what Olson characterizes as merchandise of studying, or “bookish” data. Two Spines Facet by Facet (all works 2024) facilities two vertical columns—edges and vertebrae, and likewise monochromes—every a sequence of crimson squares operating the size of the canvas, seeping from inside. (Olson names these indications of mutability “glops,” and so they recur as horizontal tracks in Two Spines Mendacity Down.) Books as such seem elsewhere, as in Web page (Haptic Textual content with Chew) and Canine-Eared Web page (Style), which considers how they’re used: as media for content material dissemination or, in cases of misuse that ship alternate sensory data, how they really feel, sound, and even style. In Major Guide and associated items, stripes perform like textual content, operating down a web page.

These multilayered work, in-built close to sculptural aid with modeling paste, likewise bifurcate the sector and radicalize results of ambient lighting in conjuring fake gentle and shadow in extra of what respectively falls and produces it. As in Library, these components produce and disrupt pictorial phantasm, hinting at so many different compositional prospects beneath any given one. And it’s this openness to not-knowing that connects these work to others that in a different way develop kinds that characterize the world of Olson’s youngster as a solution to think about coming into understanding, in addition to preexisting programs of language and mediation. Balcony and Bathtub are divided into sections comprising a grisaille checkerboard and a riot of coloration above or beside its threshold, suggesting what stays proximate however likewise past attain.

As together with her earlier work, then, if on new phrases, Olson’s work ask of our collective but additionally individuated and certainly growing experiences of embodied life-worlds, and the way we would talk one thing of but additionally past them. —Suzanne Hudson



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