Staff Pick Saturday Megan on Olive Ayhens Olive Ayhens started making paintings from an extremely elevated viewpoint as an artist in residence at the World Trade Center. Ayhens was a part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Commission’s “World Views” program which offered selected artists studio space in vacant Trade Center offices. Her paintings explore complex layers, relationships and interactions in the landscape and in interior spaces like computer labs. She examines the rhythms of people, traffic, architecture, etc. Ayhens shares her own perspective on how these things come together to exist as a single, if highly complex living organism. The paintings contain elements of looking at something from a very far distance, and also elements of examining something very closely, as if under a microscope. Even with all of the stuff, there is a good amount of space in these paintings. There’s a back and forth tug of war between the empty space and the highly frenetic subjects. It creates the tension that is essential in all good painting, and keeps the paintings perpetually activated. These paintings buzz with energy and dramatic shifts in textures, light and space. Sometimes they contain imagined elements like the Hudson river flowing as molten lava, or the humorous but effective juxtaposition of two very different kinds of landscape space (a forest river running between city buildings where streets and sidewalks should be). She weaves the elements of observation and imagination together seamlessly, achieving a suspension of disbelief in the viewer that many artists would hope for but few can achieve.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 12:00:01 +0000
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