Curated by: Emily McElwreath
In ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ the poet Sylvia Plath writes that “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” And I cannot help but hear Plath’s uncanny, cosmic voice—literally hear it, from a BBC recording of 1962, just months before Plath’s death—measur-ing the eerie length of this observation whenever I consider the color blue. I think of her winter, the cold-est in London for 100 years, and Plath, a woman alone with a toddler and an infant—the three of them flu-beset, each and all—the vicious blizzard the week she died. How there is no better invocation of that particularly alien December light than her sense of it—planetary; that is, not appreciable on a merely hu-man scale—a disquieting blue. Not quite slate, nor silver; and surely not the oceanic brilliancy of cerulean or the airiness of cornflower, but the evaporative pulsing blue of absence.
Perhaps it is strange that I come at the work of Emilia Olsen in this way, but I am unfortunately no art critic. Olsen and I met somewhere in the middle, through poetry, and poetry is the way my mind—what-ever color its light—motions and orients. As Plath understood the thin gauze separating an endlessly vast emotional spectra of blues, Olsen’s work renders these tonal vacillations and gradations of affect on an astonishingly intimate visual horizon.
Olsen is a mistress of heartbreak. It is the feeling, I believe, that threads its ruthless needle through the aching muscles of each of our bodies of work. Through our material bodies, too—because art indis-putably passes through the body, a kind of spectral echoing, especially when it is art which has the capaci-ty—as Olsen’s so incandescently does—to resonate with those fortunate enough to behold it. Olsen is an expert observer of the ways grief and longing recalibrate the planes of our physical forms: one recognizes in her paintings such reactive vulnerability through the tender bowing of the pelican’s or peacock’s heads. Or in ‘Ghosts,’ where two figures gather the boundaries of their entire selves to be enveloped in one an-other, even as the scene is overlaid in the ineluctable certainty of love lost.
In her two paintings of Holofernes—a rapist-general beheaded by the biblical Judith and her maidser-vant—we see Olsen’s facility in both figural work (in the dulled, eerily smug expression of Holofernes’ decapitated head) and her more evocative color work, which alludes to a storyline (Holofernes sleeping, ostensibly just before his gruesome end) through disorienting close up, a narrative imagined in the feeling quality of color, the peaceable kingdom of sky blue, shaded with blocks and squiggles of mustard and deeper navy. Only when you adjust your field of vision do you begin to ascertain the lashes at the top left of the painting; it is his face, in the vague unknowingness of a dreamscape.
It is this unknowingness which Olsen’s work most piercingly illustrates: the enigmatical surrender to what creeps about the periphery. We approach the house of love with a hazy perception of the likely suffering it will cause, yet enter it nevertheless, for that shock of mystery—the feeling of the hair rising on your arms, or butterflies in the stomach, as it is often said—is indispensable to so much of our pleasure. In her blue series, Olsen conjures the planes and shadows of desire—as well as the inescapable ache of getting what we want.
-Jamie Hood
Emily McElwreath is equipped with over seventeen years of experience as an adviser, independent curator and art educator; she also boasts a background in sales. Thanks to her time as Director of Communication and Education at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Emily demonstrates the unique ability to understand the art world from both the point of view of the artist and the audience. This skill is continually perfected through extensive involvement in art education: throughout her career, Emily has organized multiple programs, lectures, and panels, featuring distinguished artists, on university campuses and leading NYC venues, in addition to lecturing herself at Sotheby’s Education. Emily has worked on blockbuster exhibitions including Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel and Nate Lowman at The Brant Foundation, as well as lecturing at top NYC museums including The Whitney and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, Emily has curated multiple exhibitions with leading emerging artists and is now co-director of Pegasus Prints Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Building relationships with artists continues to be Emily’s main focus, frequenting studio visits, connecting artists with collectors, and building partnerships within the art community. With an MA from Purchase College in Art History with a Concentration in Contemporary Art Criticism and an Art Business Certification from Christie's Education, Emily McElwreath possesses diverse, real-world experience and formal academic training.
Emilia Olsen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989, and grew up in Wisconsin. In 2011, she received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, DC. She has exhibited her work nationally, with solo shows at Arts & Leisure (NY) and Doppelganger |Studio (Queens) and notable recent group exhibitions at the Spring Break Art Show (NY), Freight & Volume (NY), Gallery Also (LA), Elephant Gallery (Nashville), Greenpoint Terminal Gallery (Brooklyn), and Juxtapoz Projects at Mana Contemporary (NJ). She has been artist-in-residence at DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA); New York Studio Residency Program (Brooklyn, NY); Starry Nights (Truth Or Consequences, NM); Hotel Belmar (Costa Rica) and the Horse and Art Research Program (Hungary). Her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, Vogue, Art Maze, Hyperallergic, Maake Magazine, the podcast Sound & Vision and others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Curated by: Emily McElwreath
In ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ the poet Sylvia Plath writes that “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” And I cannot help but hear Plath’s uncanny, cosmic voice—literally hear it, from a BBC recording of 1962, just months before Plath’s death—measur-ing the eerie length of this observation whenever I consider the color blue. I think of her winter, the cold-est in London for 100 years, and Plath, a woman alone with a toddler and an infant—the three of them flu-beset, each and all—the vicious blizzard the week she died. How there is no better invocation of that particularly alien December light than her sense of it—planetary; that is, not appreciable on a merely hu-man scale—a disquieting blue. Not quite slate, nor silver; and surely not the oceanic brilliancy of cerulean or the airiness of cornflower, but the evaporative pulsing blue of absence.
Perhaps it is strange that I come at the work of Emilia Olsen in this way, but I am unfortunately no art critic. Olsen and I met somewhere in the middle, through poetry, and poetry is the way my mind—what-ever color its light—motions and orients. As Plath understood the thin gauze separating an endlessly vast emotional spectra of blues, Olsen’s work renders these tonal vacillations and gradations of affect on an astonishingly intimate visual horizon.
Olsen is a mistress of heartbreak. It is the feeling, I believe, that threads its ruthless needle through the aching muscles of each of our bodies of work. Through our material bodies, too—because art indis-putably passes through the body, a kind of spectral echoing, especially when it is art which has the capaci-ty—as Olsen’s so incandescently does—to resonate with those fortunate enough to behold it. Olsen is an expert observer of the ways grief and longing recalibrate the planes of our physical forms: one recognizes in her paintings such reactive vulnerability through the tender bowing of the pelican’s or peacock’s heads. Or in ‘Ghosts,’ where two figures gather the boundaries of their entire selves to be enveloped in one an-other, even as the scene is overlaid in the ineluctable certainty of love lost.
In her two paintings of Holofernes—a rapist-general beheaded by the biblical Judith and her maidser-vant—we see Olsen’s facility in both figural work (in the dulled, eerily smug expression of Holofernes’ decapitated head) and her more evocative color work, which alludes to a storyline (Holofernes sleeping, ostensibly just before his gruesome end) through disorienting close up, a narrative imagined in the feeling quality of color, the peaceable kingdom of sky blue, shaded with blocks and squiggles of mustard and deeper navy. Only when you adjust your field of vision do you begin to ascertain the lashes at the top left of the painting; it is his face, in the vague unknowingness of a dreamscape.
It is this unknowingness which Olsen’s work most piercingly illustrates: the enigmatical surrender to what creeps about the periphery. We approach the house of love with a hazy perception of the likely suffering it will cause, yet enter it nevertheless, for that shock of mystery—the feeling of the hair rising on your arms, or butterflies in the stomach, as it is often said—is indispensable to so much of our pleasure. In her blue series, Olsen conjures the planes and shadows of desire—as well as the inescapable ache of getting what we want.
-Jamie Hood
Emily McElwreath is equipped with over seventeen years of experience as an adviser, independent curator and art educator; she also boasts a background in sales. Thanks to her time as Director of Communication and Education at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Emily demonstrates the unique ability to understand the art world from both the point of view of the artist and the audience. This skill is continually perfected through extensive involvement in art education: throughout her career, Emily has organized multiple programs, lectures, and panels, featuring distinguished artists, on university campuses and leading NYC venues, in addition to lecturing herself at Sotheby’s Education. Emily has worked on blockbuster exhibitions including Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel and Nate Lowman at The Brant Foundation, as well as lecturing at top NYC museums including The Whitney and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, Emily has curated multiple exhibitions with leading emerging artists and is now co-director of Pegasus Prints Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Building relationships with artists continues to be Emily’s main focus, frequenting studio visits, connecting artists with collectors, and building partnerships within the art community. With an MA from Purchase College in Art History with a Concentration in Contemporary Art Criticism and an Art Business Certification from Christie's Education, Emily McElwreath possesses diverse, real-world experience and formal academic training.
Emilia Olsen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989, and grew up in Wisconsin. In 2011, she received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, DC. She has exhibited her work nationally, with solo shows at Arts & Leisure (NY) and Doppelganger |Studio (Queens) and notable recent group exhibitions at the Spring Break Art Show (NY), Freight & Volume (NY), Gallery Also (LA), Elephant Gallery (Nashville), Greenpoint Terminal Gallery (Brooklyn), and Juxtapoz Projects at Mana Contemporary (NJ). She has been artist-in-residence at DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA); New York Studio Residency Program (Brooklyn, NY); Starry Nights (Truth Or Consequences, NM); Hotel Belmar (Costa Rica) and the Horse and Art Research Program (Hungary). Her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, Vogue, Art Maze, Hyperallergic, Maake Magazine, the podcast Sound & Vision and others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Curated by: Emily McElwreath
In ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ the poet Sylvia Plath writes that “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” And I cannot help but hear Plath’s uncanny, cosmic voice—literally hear it, from a BBC recording of 1962, just months before Plath’s death—measur-ing the eerie length of this observation whenever I consider the color blue. I think of her winter, the cold-est in London for 100 years, and Plath, a woman alone with a toddler and an infant—the three of them flu-beset, each and all—the vicious blizzard the week she died. How there is no better invocation of that particularly alien December light than her sense of it—planetary; that is, not appreciable on a merely hu-man scale—a disquieting blue. Not quite slate, nor silver; and surely not the oceanic brilliancy of cerulean or the airiness of cornflower, but the evaporative pulsing blue of absence.
Perhaps it is strange that I come at the work of Emilia Olsen in this way, but I am unfortunately no art critic. Olsen and I met somewhere in the middle, through poetry, and poetry is the way my mind—what-ever color its light—motions and orients. As Plath understood the thin gauze separating an endlessly vast emotional spectra of blues, Olsen’s work renders these tonal vacillations and gradations of affect on an astonishingly intimate visual horizon.
Olsen is a mistress of heartbreak. It is the feeling, I believe, that threads its ruthless needle through the aching muscles of each of our bodies of work. Through our material bodies, too—because art indis-putably passes through the body, a kind of spectral echoing, especially when it is art which has the capaci-ty—as Olsen’s so incandescently does—to resonate with those fortunate enough to behold it. Olsen is an expert observer of the ways grief and longing recalibrate the planes of our physical forms: one recognizes in her paintings such reactive vulnerability through the tender bowing of the pelican’s or peacock’s heads. Or in ‘Ghosts,’ where two figures gather the boundaries of their entire selves to be enveloped in one an-other, even as the scene is overlaid in the ineluctable certainty of love lost.
In her two paintings of Holofernes—a rapist-general beheaded by the biblical Judith and her maidser-vant—we see Olsen’s facility in both figural work (in the dulled, eerily smug expression of Holofernes’ decapitated head) and her more evocative color work, which alludes to a storyline (Holofernes sleeping, ostensibly just before his gruesome end) through disorienting close up, a narrative imagined in the feeling quality of color, the peaceable kingdom of sky blue, shaded with blocks and squiggles of mustard and deeper navy. Only when you adjust your field of vision do you begin to ascertain the lashes at the top left of the painting; it is his face, in the vague unknowingness of a dreamscape.
It is this unknowingness which Olsen’s work most piercingly illustrates: the enigmatical surrender to what creeps about the periphery. We approach the house of love with a hazy perception of the likely suffering it will cause, yet enter it nevertheless, for that shock of mystery—the feeling of the hair rising on your arms, or butterflies in the stomach, as it is often said—is indispensable to so much of our pleasure. In her blue series, Olsen conjures the planes and shadows of desire—as well as the inescapable ache of getting what we want.
-Jamie Hood
Emily McElwreath is equipped with over seventeen years of experience as an adviser, independent curator and art educator; she also boasts a background in sales. Thanks to her time as Director of Communication and Education at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Emily demonstrates the unique ability to understand the art world from both the point of view of the artist and the audience. This skill is continually perfected through extensive involvement in art education: throughout her career, Emily has organized multiple programs, lectures, and panels, featuring distinguished artists, on university campuses and leading NYC venues, in addition to lecturing herself at Sotheby’s Education. Emily has worked on blockbuster exhibitions including Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel and Nate Lowman at The Brant Foundation, as well as lecturing at top NYC museums including The Whitney and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, Emily has curated multiple exhibitions with leading emerging artists and is now co-director of Pegasus Prints Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Building relationships with artists continues to be Emily’s main focus, frequenting studio visits, connecting artists with collectors, and building partnerships within the art community. With an MA from Purchase College in Art History with a Concentration in Contemporary Art Criticism and an Art Business Certification from Christie's Education, Emily McElwreath possesses diverse, real-world experience and formal academic training.
Emilia Olsen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989, and grew up in Wisconsin. In 2011, she received her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, DC. She has exhibited her work nationally, with solo shows at Arts & Leisure (NY) and Doppelganger |Studio (Queens) and notable recent group exhibitions at the Spring Break Art Show (NY), Freight & Volume (NY), Gallery Also (LA), Elephant Gallery (Nashville), Greenpoint Terminal Gallery (Brooklyn), and Juxtapoz Projects at Mana Contemporary (NJ). She has been artist-in-residence at DNA Residency (Provincetown, MA); New York Studio Residency Program (Brooklyn, NY); Starry Nights (Truth Or Consequences, NM); Hotel Belmar (Costa Rica) and the Horse and Art Research Program (Hungary). Her work has been featured in Two Coats of Paint, Vogue, Art Maze, Hyperallergic, Maake Magazine, the podcast Sound & Vision and others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
