2024 Gala | Tickets | View All Auction Artworks

Sarah Olson: String

DESCRIPTION

Sarah Olson, String, 2019, 6 x 6 inches, Encaustic, string, ink on board

Value: $900

Starting Bid: $400

This is part of a series of works in encaustic utilizing waste and every day materials that we throw away. These works bring to the viewer materials we usually look over in our daily lives as trash and disposable. Olson is also interested in showing the impacts of consumer waste on the environment.

I am interested in origin stories, religious and scientific and how we create personal narrative based on our own individual migration journey. My recent paintings and performances explore lost and layered history, Deep Time and our human connection to water. RISE ALL BOATS: A World Water Map, created with writer and James Baldwin Scholar, Khadija Kamara, interrogates the American migration story. This public participatory series charts human migration, personal and ancestral, deliberate and involuntary, through performative drawing, essays, mapping and oral histories. We collaborated with artist Michele Brody this year to construct a map made of sugar cane fibers in order to explain the parallel of the cultivation of sugar to the long, difficult history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This project started with a series of actions, interventions and paintings on a remote beach in Cornwall England, documented by Cornish photographer, Matthew Facey. It is here that I explore my love of swimming and the sea with the contradiction that the water represents: a place of solace, refuge and recreation for some, while for others it is a desperate last resort; a barrier to cross for many fleeing war, with the hope of seeking asylum. Through painting with oil, encaustic and mixed media such as water color, ink and found materials centered on post consumer waste, I look at the human body and our struggle towards emotional and sexual freedom, bodily autonomy, and a general sense of fluidity and comfort within nature.

Sarah Olson is a painter, performance artist and curator whose recent work explores lost and layered histories. In her recent public participatory project, RISE ALL BOATS: Bucky Ball Dreams, Wild Sugar and a path to Tyranny; an interactive mapping project about humans migrating and the conquered plant that feeds them. Olson continues her ongoing collaboration with James Baldwin Scholar, Khadija Kamara where together this year they worked with artist Michele Brody to create a world map made from sugar cane fiber. The public mapping project was created on a Dymaxion Globe, a design created by Buckminster Fuller. This iteration premiered this October at Swale House on Governors Island. The project first premiered on Governors Island in 2019 and again in 2022. It traveled to the Gullah Geechee and African Diaspora conference in 2020 at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina. Olson has exhibited paintings and created installations at Front Room Gallery, at Pratt Institute, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Joyce SoHo, Summer Stage in Central Park, Marymount Manhattan College, Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, DA Gallery, Gallery Satori, Dahesh Museum, Columbia University in NYC, and NRG Energy in Princeton, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She has exhibited work at the Museum of Design in London, Maison ManPai in Bordeaux and Hohenthal und Bergen gallery in Berlin. She has curated shows in NYC, Bridgeport,CT and Tuscany, Italy. Olson has participated in residencies in remote locations in India, Scotland, England and El Salvador and in the US, in New York City, Connecticut, Colorado and Georgia. She holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.