In a world that’s more and more constructed, compartmentalized, and mediated, her sculptures seem without delay acquainted and alien. Using the language of model-making and dioramas, the exhibition shifts between miniature and monstrous, difficult our understanding of what it means to name a planet dwelling.
Earlier than Noah Baumbach’s 2005 movie The Squid and the Whale ruined the American Museum of Pure Historical past’s Corridor of Ocean Life show, Sperm Whale and Large Squid, turning it into an allegory for dangerous intercourse and a worse marriage, this diorama was an uncanny locale, not in contrast to the tomb of two turgid gods. It was scary to get too shut. Extending one’s hand towards the unlit figures grappling of their simulacrum of unholy depths revealed that no glass partition separated this world from that of the museum. Your hand would possibly proceed to journey, shaking, into the black-violet air. Too far. You might climb proper in, if you happen to needed. Not that you’d have. Climbing in there would have been like leaping into that eerie slot glittering between the brink of an condo constructing flooring and its elevator, the slit by way of which, if we squint, we will see right into a subterranean infinity we all know is simply one other elevator shaft however appears to be like a lot like one thing else—perhaps hell, perhaps an alternate dimension. These are the types of areas we both keep away from or come near solely to leap again from once more, chilled and giddy. People appear unable, concurrently, to construct something with out creating extra of them.
An architect like Philip Johnson understood this and made a degree of foregrounding, even worshipping, horror and hazard in his glassy works. Not essentially a superb factor. Though the choice, lovingly papering-over drops and voids with a floral print interspersed with walnuts and oranges, doesn’t appear a lot better. The place ought to we retailer our terror?
Olivia Erlanger has a knack for figuring out the best way through which one thing as static as a split-level dwelling or total subdivision can function a mere tarp, a brief protecting that has form in any respect solely as a result of it’s disguising an endlessly capacious and ubiquitous gap. Bits of this gap get, paradoxically, into all the things: our meals, our cells, our capacities to type relationships. This implies which you could have a spell of vertigo taking a look at an Advil pill, a panic assault on the existence of your personal pores and skin. The miniature is haunted. So is the huge. And it isn’t even demise that brings about this possession; slightly, it’s one thing a lot more durable to trace and determine, our utter incapability to let go of the concept that we may have been higher kids.
—Lucy Ives
at Luhring Augustine, New York
till April 19, 2025
