My mother Alana Olsen (1955 – 2016) didn’t know two years after her death she would have been almost forgotten. Yet to write that sentence suggests once she was relatively well known. She wasn’t, not outside a small handful of friends, family, fellow artists. She produced fewer than 20 videos over the course of her life. Some are already missing.
Sorting through her belongings, my brother Lance discovered a slip of paper taped to the wall next to her desk, on it an unattributed quote:
The only hope for the survival of rock art is obscurity.
Another way of saying this: There’s No Place Like Time, the retrospective of my mother’s work I have been asked to curate, wonders what an aesthetics of obscurity looks like. What is the relationship between quality in art & quantity? What city in this conversation does my mother inhabit, & how?
A compilation of videos, texts, objects, hypotheses, & interventions, There’s No Place Like Time can be likened to a Wunderkammer, where distinct objects, lifted from their original situations, converse with one another, inviting the reader to remember, digress, discover, imagine.
The composite doesn’t seek to replicate, replace, or stand in for the past. It doesn’t seek to function as immutable historical documentation. It is rather meant to suggest a choreography, a way of moving through the world.
My father went missing shortly after my mother died. I assume he’s gone, too. Assume he killed himself after my mother succumbed, like so many others during the pandemic, to The Frost’s growing sensation of coldness & amnesia.
My father simply vanished. A manuscript, Theories of Forgetting, which I choose to believe he wrote—a novel, perhaps; perhaps an autobiographical imagining of his own demise—showed up on my doorstep in Berlin. I conversed with him in its margins.
The slip of paper below the first taped to the wall next to my mother’s desk reads:
Maybe life is simply a process of trading hopes for memories.
My mother Alana Olsen (1955 – 2016) didn’t know two years after her death she would have been almost forgotten. Yet to write that sentence suggests once she was relatively well known. She wasn’t, not outside a small handful of friends, family, fellow artists. She produced fewer than 20 videos over the course of her life. Some are already missing.
Sorting through her belongings, my brother Lance discovered a slip of paper taped to the wall next to her desk, on it an unattributed quote:
The only hope for the survival of rock art is obscurity.
Another way of saying this: There’s No Place Like Time, the retrospective of my mother’s work I have been asked to curate, wonders what an aesthetics of obscurity looks like. What is the relationship between quality in art & quantity? What city in this conversation does my mother inhabit, & how?
A compilation of videos, texts, objects, hypotheses, & interventions, There’s No Place Like Time can be likened to a Wunderkammer, where distinct objects, lifted from their original situations, converse with one another, inviting the reader to remember, digress, discover, imagine.
The composite doesn’t seek to replicate, replace, or stand in for the past. It doesn’t seek to function as immutable historical documentation. It is rather meant to suggest a choreography, a way of moving through the world.
My father went missing shortly after my mother died. I assume he’s gone, too. Assume he killed himself after my mother succumbed, like so many others during the pandemic, to The Frost’s growing sensation of coldness & amnesia.
My father simply vanished. A manuscript, Theories of Forgetting, which I choose to believe he wrote—a novel, perhaps; perhaps an autobiographical imagining of his own demise—showed up on my doorstep in Berlin. I conversed with him in its margins.
The slip of paper below the first taped to the wall next to my mother’s desk reads:
Maybe life is simply a process of trading hopes for memories.
