B. Ingrid Olson - All Lock No Key

Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present B. Ingrid Olson, All Lock No Key. This is the artist's first exhibition at the gallery. The ground is constantly shifting. A term may stir, awaken, move into another term's nest. Photography dives into sculpture which morphs into assemblage and is then sublated into installation. Givens are unglued. And reglued. Beds are unmade. And tidied. In B. Ingrid Olson's work, which integrates a staggering variety of ideas and materials, a body – some body – is configured as a runway, a site of arrivals and departures. Working with cast, carved, sculpted, found, painted, screen-printed, and photographed materials, Olson addresses an intimate yet broadly relatable set of open secrets and secretive openings. As concrete as these pliable substances are, so is Olson's use of ambiguity, which she deploys as another working material. What is that thing I see? Is it an appendage? A wrapper? An egg? A mold? A slipper? A mushroom? Something covertly erotic or explicitly abject? In her most recent work, she has constructed objects that imply possible violence – ranging from surgery to disinterment, or even evisceration – objects that also destabilize one's sense of position in space. Like Charles Olson's projective verse, which the poet (no known relation) declared "proprioceptive," B. Ingrid Olson describes her work as "promoting a self-consciousness of body and mind, of subjectivity and of having a specific vantage point while 'looking.' The viewer then becomes a visitor: embodied looking, an aware encounter." In All Lock No Key, Olson has constructed a large architectural installation based on The Vault, the gallery's video room, turning that usually secluded space inside-out. In the surrogate structure, Realia for punishment or distinction (is this a human problem? If so I'd like to keep it), 2026, the artist has everted the shelving and placed a sculptural composition into its illuminated interior. Lighting is critical to the exhibition, which subsumes the majority of the south gallery space, bathing it in a caramel glow. Only one corner of the room is brightly lit to present a dense cluster of wall-based works, as if they were creatures drawn to the bright light leak created by a slim vertical gap where the two walls might otherwise meet.