Sideways Time

2016 - Sculpture (Sculpture)
52.75H x 17.75W x 22.15D inches

Sideways Time by Olivia Erlanger is the result of the artist’s interest in networks, seen and unseen, financial and ecological, the collapse of which has resulted in the fracturing of a middle class American identity. Consumption and the construction of value are a frequent concern of her sculptures that explore the structural friction between a public and private. Erlanger looks to the architecture that connects these systems for inspiration and in this sense, the language of scaffoldings, foundations and facades that percolate throughout her work. As the artist has stated: “Anything that can be built simultaneously holds the potential to fall.” The filing cabinet is a romantic artifact from a pre-cloud based society, designed to give order to personal and impersonal information as well as receipts or small ephemera that document diurnal shifts in value, stacking this information vertically and horizontally giving time a spatial dimension or body. Filled with bentonite clay, a material known for its purifying quality, the cabinets have sheets of porcelain newspapers on the top and off to the side. Sections are cut out, seemingly blown away, as if the contents imploded, revealing the architectural system which failed to organize and contain it. A red light glows inside, subtly adjusting in intensity according to a live stream of data on oil prices. The information regarding this ever shifting commodity seeps out, escaping the confines of the cabinet’s form.

Olivia Erlanger is a New York based artist that works between sculpture and conceptual art. She studied Sculpture and Literature at Lewis and Clark College and Parsons School of Design. Recent exhibitions include Seventeen, London, UK; Fluxia, Milan, Italy; Balice Hertling at The Film Center, New York; Marbriers 4, Geneva, Switzerland; Important Projects, Oakland, CA; Center, Berlin, Germany; and AIRBNB Pavilion, Venice, Italy. Erlanger also co?directs the New York project space, Grand Century, with Dora Budor and Alex Mackin Dolan.

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