Sig Olson

BIO

Their work has been exhibited at Tappeto Volante (Brooklyn, NY), Gordon Robichaux Gallery (NYC & LA), 292 Gallery (NYC), Traywick Contemporary (Berkeley), Sarah Sherpard Gallery (Marin county), the Lab (SF), and Southern Exposure (SF) Sig Olson works and lives in Brooklyn.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Sig Olson is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, photography, video, and sculpture. Their work is inspired by textiles, music, architecture, nostalgia, walking, and collecting. They use color, pattern, and composition in abstractions that they describe as queer and emotional landscapes.

Interview with Sig Olson

Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in becoming an artist?

The short: I grew up in Portland Oregon, was born in 1971 to young, creative parents, and a brother, two years my senior. Both their families were originally from Montana. I come from industrious hard working people, railroad and boat builders, seamstresses, shop keepers, and ranchers. I grew up spending a lot of time in my mothers sewing factory surrounded by sewing machines and work tables. These are the skills passed down by my family: how to draw, how to build, how to paint, how to sew, and how to adventure (especially the dramatic situations and the WOW of nature).

My earliest art influences came through music and film. I had moved to Seattle in 1987 with my mother for my last two years of high school and took a job at an art house film cinema called Seven Gables. Watching foreign and independent films and being alone in the cinema became my escape and my vision.

I was so lonely, suffering with my closeted queerness and my budding addiction problems. I also began to take photography seriously and would walk around Seattle alleys and vintage stores and take photos. I think I always knew that the only way I would connect with other people and the world, or understand the purpose of my existence, was to translate my feelings, thoughts, and loves through art as memoir. I first began with creative writing and photography and then added in drawing, painting, video and sculpture.

At 24, in 1995, I was studying painting at the Fort Mason extension of San Francisco City College. I had wanted to study math or pre-med, knowing I needed to make money to be able to support myself and pay the rent but just kept returning to drawing and painting and photography, encouraged by my girlfriend. I think I “decided” to be an artist when I committed to doing my college degree in fine arts. (an unveiling that involved commitment and sobriety )

Can you tell us about some of your most memorable early influences?

my mother’s sewing work, my father’s drawings and sculptures, my grandmother's fashion, my grandfather’s boat building, fabric stores, my sports practice

Vagabond - Agnes Varda

Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown –Pedro Almodovar

antique stores, flea markets, vintage clothing, industrial areas, swimming pools, ports, libraries

Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Martin, Anni Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Jerome Caja, Hellen Levitt, Eva Hesse, Mike Kelly, Charles Atlas, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Klee, Beverly Buchanan, David Hammons, William Eggleston, the film: Harold and Maude, Raw Vision magazine.

Where are you currently based and what brought you there? Are there any aspects of this specific location or community that have inspired your work?

Brooklyn, NY

I initially came to NYC in 1998 to study photography with Roy DeCarava at Hunter College, but ended up more drawn to painting and sculpture with Nari Ward. NYC is the only place I have ever been able to earn a decent living in an arts related field. I love to photograph here and I love how the city is never ending and never sleeping. I still love the same things that drew me here initially: the bridges, the museums, the galleries, the friendships, the ability to be alone but never alone, the way everyone talks to you on the street, the way people here go to movies alone…

What is your studio space like? What makes your space unique to you?

I usually work out of my home. I prefer to be surrounded by my own things and thoughts, to have my kitchen and my food. Essentials are: direct sunlight, quiet, and a glass topped work table.

What is a typical day like? If you don't have a typical day, what is an ideal day?

I like to begin my day with as long of a walk as possible, often taking my camera. Currently I take a long walk in Prospect Park, following the woodsy path along Flatbush and wrapping around to the Vale of Cashmere where I watch the birds. I sit there for a long moment. Then I walk either back the same path or go on a longer loop crossing Flatbush and walk back home through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens - stopping in the desert and tropical arboretums. I get home and usually walk the poodles, and then eat some breakfast, do some cleaning, and then work on my paintings. Or if I am doing set work for a photo shoot, it is another type of day engaging with clients that usually starts at 6 am and I am not home until 7 pm.

What gets you in a creative groove or flow? Is there anything that interrupts your creative energy?

Calm, quiet, sunshine, walking, the sea, rivers, port towns, museums, book stores, flea markets, thrift stores, movies, being with animals, music videos, interviews.

Instagram can derail me, not knowing what to eat can derail me.

How do you maintain momentum in your practice?

Writing, visiting museums, street photography, films, recovery, therapy, the practice of doing. Conversations with other artists.

What medium/media are you working in right now? What draws you to this particular material or method?

Painting, photography, sculpture, video

With painting I like that is open ended, like a feeling, an emotion, and it is just a complete improvisational dance of color and shape and repetition. And it can also encompass sampling, sampling of color and pattern that I have previously created.

With street photography I like how it is always a surprise like you don’t know what is going to be there and depending on the light or the season the same wall or object will change and be gone potentially moments later. It's temporary and fleeting and startling. It allows me to continually fall in love with my surroundings and the people in my life, like an intentional way to view them with love and interest. Sculpture is more similar to my professional commercial work, it is like math and harmony and the Wabi Sabi of materials that I work out in my head, and then put together on location that tells a story or expresses an emotion.

Video is storytelling and capturing moments I don’t want to ever forget-home movies, like lovers and romance and friendship and comedy, a way for me to be intimate with people and be a part of.

Can you walk us through your overall process in making your current work? Does drawing play a role in your process?

I love to draw and come from a lineage of drawers, so it is something I have always loved, but for the most part I am either taking painting or taking photographs. I am able to be more engaged with paint, and to let my emotion tell the story, but I absolutely adore rendering with pencil. It somehow recalls my father and so I feel at home with the nostalgia and the memory of that practice.

What is exciting about your process currently?

I would say recent archiving has been pretty exhilarating - the process of organizing my photos from the early ‘90s until now. To see the lines and the connections and the growth in myself, and the realities that myself and my loved ones endured and continue to endure, and the process of translating my smaller gouache paintings and studies into larger paintings and sculptures.

Can you talk about some of the ongoing interests, imagery, and concepts that have informed your process and body of work over time? How do you anticipate your work progressing in the future?

Lovers and friends, and places I love to be. Neighborhoods I live in, walks I take daily, queer beaches I frequent year after year. The american southwest. I tend to get very ritualistic about my walking practice and the places that I draw from and photograph. I tend to photograph the same few people over and over. I would rather find it as a collaboration of connection than a distant objectification, and so most of my photos and paintings are of those people and places I am very intimate with. I like the telling of these stories over time. The paintings and the sculptures take all the emotional data I have collected and refine and simplify these feelings into works that are meant to be arresting and revealing.

Do you pursue any collaborations, projects, or careers in addition to your studio practice? If so, can you tell us more about those projects, and are there connections between your studio practice and these endeavors?

I am lucky to have a job in commercial arts that pays my bills and that I can utilize all the materials and skills I have gained from being a decorative painter, set designer and prop stylist for 15 years. I love to talk about the nuance of walls and floors and chairs and the way to install any type of wall design. It has been a fortunate career to land in, though my body has many creaks from ladders and lifting and building and painting large scale.

Have you had any epiphanies recently that have changed the course of your work or caused you to shift directions?

Stay the course, meaning it has taken a lot of roads traveled to find that the one I am on feels like the most authentic. And that I have a desire to be a part of the conversation, I could talk about color and shapes and line quality and paper quality and paint flow and movies and photography and poetry and love and friendship and struggle and addiction and recovery and oppression and survival with full attention for the rest of my lifetime. And see the work that I make as a gift to be shared.

Can you share some of your recent influences? Are there specific works—from visual art, literature, film, or music—that are important to you?

Charles Atlas at Lurghine Augustine, Merrett Oppenheim at the MOMA, Agnes Martin bio especially in regards to thinking about her living in the South Seaport of Manhattan, Sophie Calle, Dorothea Rockburne at DIA Beacon, Agnes Varda shorts and commercial shorts for department of travel on Criterion, all Mike Leigh films and shorts on Criterion, memes, Audre lorde, videos of Toni Morrison and Angela Davis in conversation, Lorraine Hansberry plays, James Baldwin interviews, Joy Harjo biography, Pat Parker poems, Helen Levitt films of NYC at MOMA, Vivian Maier self portraits

Who are some contemporary artists you’re excited about? What are the best exhibitions you’ve seen in recent memory and why do they stand out?

Most of my friends are contemporary artists and I adore all of them, I fear leaving someone out so will stay focused on the exhibitions that have impressed me this year: Charles Atlas, Sophie Tauber Arp, Alice Neale, Meret Oppenheim, Hilma Af Klint (I preferred the show at the New Museum). Shigeko Kubota at MOMA. Wengechi Mutu at the New Museum.

Do you have any tips or advice that someone has shared with you that you have found particularly helpful?

Make your practice a daily practice. Go to where it is warm. Surround yourself with people that are supportive and be supportive. Practice not perfection. I often think about Agnes Martin saying somewhere, i am paraphrasing “There are those that make the art, those that buy the art, and those that sell the art and they are not the same person.”

What are you working on in the studio right now? What’s coming up next for you?

The smaller gouache on paper painting being sampled into larger painting works, continuing to archive my photography, a zine of my photographs from ‘90s San Francisco.

Anything else you would like to share?

I think everyone should answer these questions for themselves if it is helpful to try and understand and translate your artistic history, process and direction. Take what you like and leave the rest.

To find out more about Sig Olson check out their Instagram.