Brandon Walls Olsen
Artist
San Francisco, CA
www.brandonwallsolsen.com
b@brandonwallsolsen.com
In Brandon Walls Olsen’s first fully realized exhibition, he begins with the subject of his family’s recently passed pet cat, to which he constructed an elaborate memorial. Its focal point is an altered model train that rotates clumsily, but continuously around a tight circle, mimicking the cat’s movements after an apparent stroke late in its life. To provide a private space for viewing the memorial, Olsen designed a fully decorated interior within a pre-fabricated storage shed. Located in his parents’ yard, this unit is totally disguised, complete with a zippered curtain inset in the doorway that has been painted to match the riding mower and garden equipment pictured in the shed’s online image for suggested use.
Documented in a home video, this intimate site will be carefully presented in Rotated Views amongst projects in a number of media. The exhibition as a whole will highlight Olsen’s interest in making highly personal works accessible by methods such as reframing their media or context, placing them alongside other objects that use disparate techniques or question authorship, and directing the visitor’s experiences and perceptions through installation tactics. All of these decisions consider honesty and original intent with highest priority, but strive to be playfully absurd as well.
This is Brandon Walls Olsen’s first solo exhibition. He received an MFA from California College of the Arts and BAs in Art and Psychology from UC Berkeley.
