NYAB Event - Corey Olsen “Garage Still Lifes”

Corey Olsen “Garage Still Lifes”

Julie Saul Gallery

This event has ended.

Julie Saul Gallery presents Garage Still Lifes, a selection of color photographs by Corey Olsen, in his first gallery exhibition.

“Somewhere among a tedious hardware store display window, a five-year-old’s depiction of his parent’s garage, and the sort of ‘do-what-you-can-with-what-you-have’ installation art of the moment are Corey Olsen’s Garage Still Lifes. A self-described “time capsule” filled with “a bunch of crap that was meant to make sense together but doesn’t to an outsider,” Olsen’s garage yields images that are unconcerned with utilitarian order. On the contrary, the pictures beam with crafty solutions, mischievous combinations, and the type of nostalgia that makes you smirk more than jerk a tear. Rusted paint rollers balanced on a green grate, a Pokémon card roped tightly to an ancient can of gasoline, a sheet of graph paper sprinkled with fuses and frustratingly small parts that only your dad would understand - these relationships won’t subsist and they weren’t meant to. But for the camera, Olsen’s curiously constructed, free-thinking, wisecracking exhibition thrives in full color.” - David Brandon Geeting

Olsen further describes this project as an attempt to make sense of these objects in a particular time and context, explore their misconnections and create still lifes that possess nostalgia and meaning, primarily expressed through form and color.

In a way, they are the 21st century illustration of the famous quote by the proto-surrealist poet, the Comte de Lautréamont … “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.” c.1870

Olsen recently graduated from the School of Visual Arts, and this year his first eponymous monograph was published by Silent Sound in an edition of 300. Signed copies of the book will be available at the gallery.