B. Ingrid Olson: Elastic X, Secession, Wien

It takes time to decipher what you actually see: somewhat shifted from the center of the photograph is a reflective object—an aging but elegant trash can. The reflection reveals the photographer, but the area around the eyes, where she is holding the camera, has vanished in the object’s fold. Below the chin, the shiny surface reflects her open crotch clad in dark pantyhose. In front of the sex, a curved tip protrudes into the picture. This sculptural collage, which B. Ingrid Olson set up, is situated against a background laid in stripes: a reddish-brown tiled floor, a creamywhite stripe in front of a mint-green wall, but also stripes that defy description. The photograph is bathed in warm light, with strict geometric reflections adding another pictorial layer to it.

The work’s cantilevered white plexiglass frame juts into the room: on the one hand, this forces us to stand directly in front of the photograph to see the image in its entirety; on the other, this sculptural element provides intimacy. What is more, both the title and the installation of the work think the viewer’s body along with it: Perfect Spectator, perforation (2021–22). A gray sculpture resembling a CCTV, installed low at a pelvic height, protrudes into the gallery space and echoes the sculptural qualities of the photograph. The corresponding text, written by the curator Annette Südbeck for the exhibition Elastic X, starts out with “the question of what it means to see and to be seen” and unfolds the correlation between the artist’s “body, the bodies of the beholders, and the architectonic body.” It is a complex relationship that B. Ingrid Olson delicately probes.

The artist constructs the pictorial spaces of her multidimensional photographs not virtually but in the actual physical space of her studio— or, as was the case with Elastic X, at the residency space of Surf Point Foundation in York on the coast of Maine, where she produced most of the exhibited works. The point of departure of her work is her own androgynous female body: she sets herself in relation to her studio space, using found materials (such as a decanter, a trash bin, or little white rubber objects that cannot be deciphered and hover between balloons or condoms), and photographs her body in a fragmented manner. Obviously, the photographs subvert notions of a self-portrait through the many layers that are constructed (including transparency and mirroring) and through her chosen angle (pointing downward) when mounting the image; instead, the artist is sharing her firstperson perspective very closely. The condensed photographs thus also test normative and gendered materials and experiment with their relations to the beholder.

Already in the first gallery of the exhibition, B. Ingrid Olson brings the body and related spatial questions from the pictorial space into the actual space: the floor plan of this first room in the basement of the Secession has the form of a Greek cross, a square with four equal openings, flowing into niches. B. Ingrid Olson marked the inner square with creamy-white sculptural elements, framing four small anthropomorphic sculptures, again installed at a lower height, made out of materials such as porcelain, rusted steel, lacquer, sand, papier-mâché, latex, or wool. The measurements of those objects resembling bodily anatomy might correspond to human proportions; the beholder is integrated into this meticulously fathomed space.

The artist’s book accompanying the exhibition is titled 323, revealing the number of photographs shown inside. It has a French binding and a cardboard cover showing only a black outline of a square, the Polaroid format subtly implying the chosen tool. The mainly black-and-white images present material from the artist’s studio, found objects, small remains from larger works, and little things carefully placed next to or stacked over one another. In long sequences (of up to twenty-five images), B. Ingrid Olson shares her interest in forms and her countless investigations tying them to the photograph; the visual information allows an interplay between objects, ground, and light to unfold. The long shadows and the warm light suggest that the pictures were taken in the evening. “Maybe I want to cast only a passing shadow. Feel like my mother’s ‘Thank God’ when she took off her corset,” says Rosmarie Waldrop in her poem “Doing” on the first page of this book.