Olivia Erlanger

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.