For her forthcoming exhibition Fan Fiction at Soft Opening, Olivia Erlanger continues her ongoing research into appliances, presenting four large-scale ceiling fan sculptures whose blades have been altered to resemble butterfly wings. The new works build on Erlanger’s interest in “closed worlds’’, architecture theorist Lydia Kallipoliti’s term for describing man-made, climate-controlled environments that exist to the detriment and obfuscation of a so-called natural world outside. Erlanger has chosen butterfly-wing patterns that represent a phenomenon known as Batesian mimicry, wherein non-poisonous species have evolved to imitate the traits of toxic ones—to avoid being eaten by their predators. For Erlanger, this mimicry complex correlates to strategies of sociopolitical adaptation. In Fan Fiction, the works address this tendency with humour by disguising her sculptures as familiar household commodities. Throughout her practice, Erlanger frequently transforms prosaic and mundane objects and architectures into the fantastic.
4 October–23 November, 2024
6 Minerva St
Opening Preview:
Thursday 3 October, 6–8pm
Olivia Erlanger (b. 1990, New York) works across sculpture, film, writing and performance to examine American dreams and delusions. Mining the myth of suburbia affords the artist a focus on the semiotics of the periphery, analyzing its architecture, infrastructures and ecosystems. Erlanger was awarded the 2024 International Sculpture Prize by Fondazione Henraux. Selected recent exhibitions include If Today Were Tomorrow at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2024, solo); Humour in the Water Coolant at ICA London, UK (2024, performance); Appliance at Kunstverien Gartenhaus, Vienna (2022, solo); Nonmemory at Hauser Wirth, Los Angeles (2023), Dream Journal at Company Gallery, New York (2023); On Failure, at Soft Opening, London (2023) and Shell at Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles (2022). Erlanger is the author of Appliance (Wild Seeds, 2022) and the co-author of Garage (MIT Press, 2018) with architect Luis Ortega Govela. Her writing has appeared in publications including Tank Magazine, PIN UP, Flash Art, and Harvard Design Magazine. Her work is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; KADIST, San Francisco and X Museum, Shanghai. The artist lives and works in New York.