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.