By Kirstin Ohrt
Department of Art & Archaeology
Lauren Olson embedded the origin story of her exhibition, I Hear Machines Underwater, in its title. When headphones wouldn’t block the penetrating sound of jackhammers outside her dorm one morning, she fled to the sound insulation of water at DeNunzio Pool, where she heard …another jackhammer. “The sound infiltrated my body,” she said. “I almost chuckled to myself ‘Wow, I cannot escape the sound of machines.’”
All of my works feel like fluidity against hard lines—in some ways playing into both at the same time. I think that’s because I’ve spent so many hours of my life in the pool.
— Lauren Olson ’24
A video fills an annex in the gallery explicitly conveying the experience, filmed underwater in a pool and accompanied by a construction soundtrack. Across the room, another video reiterates the experience through the metaphor of a fork jostling an egg. “I’m exploring thoughts about body and gender and labor,” said Olson. “That’s how I intended these two pieces to play, and how the idea for the show started.”
“A lot of the show is focused on unpacking what the construction site means,” Olson continued. “I think a lot about how the work of many people is in the walls of the gallery and my work is just on that.” Olson questions the source of power in labor; it’s in the workers’ bodies and in the institutional bodies that employ the workers. Olson also follows the thread of labor to domestic work in the home as well as to the labor of giving birth.
Exhibition Video Tour with Lauren Olson
Centered in the gallery, a sculptural work features a looping video in slow motion of Olson laboriously completing a pull-up, again and again. Described by her adviser and director of the Visual Arts Program Professor Jeff Whetstone as a “machine” for her abundant productivity, Olson pointedly held back this time. “I was interested in parting ways with the intense energy of my studio,” she said. “In this show, it’s more about the detail work, the components—knowing, like an athlete, when to pull back and when to push it.”
The resulting carefully curated works primarily revolve around the medium that most resonates for Olson: photography. “I push and pull photography—I max it out,” she said. A pair of large photo works depict colorful abstractions, in one case capturing a CD refracting light in a mirrored box, and in the other, a spider web distilled to its color channels pulled apart and layered over one another.
Another grouping of black and white photographs and photograms using a spectrum of techniques in the dark room as well as with Adobe Photoshop layers bodies on and within buildings. This group most clearly illustrates the aesthetic that Olson sees permeating her art practice: “All of my works feel like fluidity against hard lines—in some ways playing into both at the same time,” she said. “I think that’s because I’ve spent so many hours of my life in the pool.”
I Hear Machines Underwater is on view in Hurley Gallery from March 18-29, 2024.
