This contemporary art piece features a circular arrangement of vertical metal bars painted in a muted silver color. The bars are arranged in a repeating fence-like pattern, creating a striking visual effect. The overall composition is geometric and minimalist, emphasizing the interplay of light and shadow through the gaps between the bars. The piece appears to explore themes of enclosure, separation, and the tension between open and closed spaces. The artist's intention may have been to evoke a sense of both protection and constraint, inviting the viewer to ponder the symbolic meaning behind the installation. ...
Influenced by 1990s TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files, Olivia Erlanger is interested in combining the backdrop of middle-class Americana and the American Dream with elements of the uncanny and the supernatural. In her 2020 installation, ‘Ida! Ida! Ida!’ Erlanger depicts mermaid tails protruding from washing machines in a neon-lit laundromat. For her, this location is a microcosm for the economic and socio-political forces that clash in the everyday, from the housing crisis and disparate development to gentrification.’ Erlanger’s gesture chains the mythological mermaid – considered independent and liberated, symbolic of transformation and transcending the limits of one’s body – with the washing machine, a motif of middle-class domestication and automated, mundane cyclicality. In ‘Home is a Body’ (2020), Erlanger produces plexiglass portals reminiscent of ominous CCTV domes in reference to the stranglehold of surveillance capitalism. Or perhaps they are snow globes, within which one expects to find idealised romantic and rose-tinted images that remind us of childhood. While Erlanger’s works are like rooms in a doll’s house, they are furnished with distinctly modern fixtures and rendered in Millennial Pink and pastel blue, symbolising consumerism and the diluted yet still unobtainable ambitions of the contemporary American Dream. ...
Founded in 2018 by Antonia Marsh, Soft Opening presents UK-based and international emerging contemporary artists, and often their first solo presentations in London. Focusing on work pushing the conventional limits of medium or material, the gallery presents a wide range of media and practices. Soft Opening built its early program with projects that responded to the gallery’s unique first location in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station. Opening a second space in East London in 2019 saw programming strategy develop as Soft Opening began participating in international art fairs and representing artists. Programming is now focused at this East London space. In 2020 the gallery began publishing artist monographs - the first was with Tenant of Culture in 2020 followed by Gina Fischli in 2021 and Sin Wai Kin in 2022. ...
