Olivia Erlanger, Blue Sky, 2024, wire, flocking, foam, plaster, acrylic, aluminum, graphite, shoe polish LED, plexiglass, driver, 127 x 81 x 91 cm. Photo: Sean Fleming. Courtesy CAM Houston
Olivia Erlanger: Spinoff
Luhring Augustine, New York, through 19 April
The New York-based artist Olivia Erlanger has spent a decade sifting through the spatial imaginary of America’s suburban middle class, scrutinising unsung architectural typologies such as garages – the subject of a research project she undertook with architect Luis Ortega Govela in the 2010s – and defamiliarising mundane commercial appliances. Erlanger went viral on Instagram in 2018 for her installation Ida, for which she placed silicone mermaid tails in the washers and driers of a laundromat in Los Angeles. Spinoff, a presentation of her new and recent works at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca location, comes on the heels of her first solo exhibition at a US museum, If Today Were Tomorrow at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and features several of the works displayed there. Spinoff likewise traffics in figures of the uncanny, or unhomelike, shedding light on places and spaces frozen in stasis. A suite of graphite drawings depicts unfurnished domestic interiors juxtaposed with natural landscapes; in the centre of the space, three dioramas frame unpopulated vistas filled with miniature topiaries, rock formations and retro-futuristic buildings. There is no action here, much less violence: tension lies instead in the uncertainty of whether one has arrived before or after the cataclysm – or right in the eye of the storm.
Read full article at artreview.com
