The State of Things
(in two parts)

James Lindsay | Lance Austin Olsen

March 17 to May 5, 2018

A continuation and evolution of their 2016 exhibition hide in plain sight, The State of Things (in two parts) extends the interrogative narrative of that exhibition into uncharted territory for Olsen and Lindsay, even as it arises from the cumulative sum of each artist’s life. Lindsay eschews pure abstraction to present a suite of 19 new paintings that “document our contentment with the unpalatable parts per million in our nature.” The precarity and beauty of islands under threat from spillage and navigational hazards underscore ongoing concerns around health, environment and corporeal existence. Olsen, whose experimental sound work has always seamlessly tied into his visual output, has imagined an installation composed of and reliant on both; presenting a new sound work scored from drypoint plates in addition to prints and paintings. The artists—“both at an age where death is no longer an abstraction”—agree that careerism is anathema to life. The exhibition has been bifurcated temporally for these most recent (and undoubtedly not last) iterations of their vital and ongoing production, with Lindsay and Olsen remaining in conversation with each other, despite or perhaps because of the resolute independence of each voice.