Sig Olson Solo Show
Curated by Ksenia M. Soboleva
Opening on November 16th, 2022, from 6 PM to 8 PM
On view until January 22nd, 2023

Tappeto Volante proudly announces This Has Happened, a solo show featuring works by Sig Olson curated by Ksenia M. Soboleva, opening Wednesday, November 16, 2022, 6-8 pm.

Text By Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva

“Reality is made of paper.”
Etel Adnan, 2018

How did we meet? It was a memorial exhibition, the first year of the pandemic.
Sig Olson was introduced to me as Siggy, and they have remained Siggy ever since.
Sometimes I forget their last name, Olson, as I have packed so much affection into the first.
When we met, I felt that we already knew each other, a phrase that tends to be overused in descriptions of true friendship. Familiarity offers a commonplace of comfort. Yet, it’s a history of discomfort that connects me and Olson. We are inhabited by a past in which drugs and alcohol are two main ingredients. The lack of a net is another overarching theme.

Immersed in the queer scene of 1990s San Francisco, Olson photographed their closest friends and romantic partners from intimate corners of being. Soft and hazy, these photographs are representative of a particular aesthetic sensibility that marked the decade. Informed by hours spent in arthouse cinemas, they are reminiscent of contact sheets capturing the zeitgeist of a city in an epidemic. Not linear, but concurrent.

By the end of the 1990s, Olson had lost many friends; some to AIDS, some to addiction, and some to that inevitable divider called time. Punctured by melancholy, the photographs became indexes of ghosts; carriers of distorted memories no longer welcome to a lucid mind. Olson stored them away in an effort to heal. Tormented by representation, they turned to abstraction.

Working primarily on paper, Olson’s abstract compositions are registers of what remains after a wave of life has its way with you. Vibrant shapes gently clash into each other, creating arrangements that bring rest. Forms and patterns float together in pictorial space, attuned to each other’s presence. Often, the compositions are inspired by places and landscapes Olson has visited; a crowded beach becomes as a series of diagonals in undefined space, and a misty morning surrenders to the expansiveness of blue. The colors hum and murmur. As the paper surface soaks up the paint, a texture of emotion reveals itself akin to a geological map. These are the physical substances of Olson’s history.

In their new site-specific sculpture, Olson builds – both literally and conceptually – on their longstanding practice as a set designer. Contrary to the intricate nature of their painting, created in a home environment, this occupation has allowed Olson to explore moving shapes around on a large scale. Yet, where set design does not permit deep attachment, inherently temporal in its nature, Olson’s sculptures are everlasting offerings.

The works on view at Tappeto Volante are a testament to what it means to bear the weight of the unbearable. Where does the heart go when the heartbeats of a thriving queer scene stop beating? Who picks up the pieces of our emotional car crashes? Abstraction offers a place to contemplate and process what has happened.
What has happened is this.

Sig Olson, Full Moon, Provincetown, 2019. gouache on paper.

Sig Olson is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, photography, video, and sculpture. Their work is inspired by textiles, music, architecture, nostalgia, walking, and collecting. They use color, pattern, and composition in abstractions that they describe as queer and emotional landscapes.

Their work has been exhibited at Gordon Robichaux Gallery (NYC & LA), 292 Gallery (NYC), Traywick Contemporary (Berkeley), Sarah Sherpard Gallery (Marin county), the Lab (SF), and Southern Exposure (SF) 
Sig Olson works and lives in  Brooklyn.

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York-based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled "Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States." Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, art-agenda, and various exhibition catalogs. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at New York University.