Cerulean Arts Gallery
1355 Ridge Ave.
Philadelphia
Seen Feb. 20, 2025
Showing from Jan. 29 - Feb. 23
Wallflowers might go unnoticed, but they hold hidden worlds within.
Andie Olsen’s intricate floral compositions are a testament to that truth. They’re now on display as part of a three-person show at Cerulean Arts Gallery titled, “A World of One’s Own.”
At first glance, the energetic sketches of leaves, blossoms and mushrooms look like samples of ornate wallpaper. I could imagine passing over the potency of the abstract artworks by interpreting them as colorful studies of the biosphere. But these are by no means your usual botanical illustrations; I’d beware of pasting prints of Olsen’s designs across four walls for fear that the sinuous nature of her pen would consume you whole.
“My art is a steel fist in a velvet glove,” Olsen says of her own work, in an online artist statement.
Past the neon facade of acrylic markers are subtleties unseen. With the help of fine-point watercolor and Pearl Ex pigment, a spore-like granularity emerges from the background. The lush cohesion of newborn petals adorn the center space of many of Olsen’s images, but there is always a darkness emanating out of the base of her work. The forest floor lies beneath, ready to consume as much eroding matter as it can stomach — death and rebirth, it seems, are equally important facets of Olsen’s inner world and outer work.
The repetitive particularity of Olsen’s style — the ombre brush strokes, persistent outlining and seemingly infinite application of texture ostensibly acquired through circuitous dotting and dabbing of wet paint — has a “Magic Eye” effect. I almost expected some existential answers to arrive out of the black pupils of Olsen’s dark, spongey drawings.
Olsen’s ingenuity no doubt stems from the mycelial magic of fungal intelligence. Mushrooms, a common motif in Olsen’s work, have emerged in mainstream culture over the past decade as scientific celebrities following research into their underground problem-solving and memory capabilities (not to mention their old-school psychedelic properties). It’s nice to see their alien world getting some fresh respect — if I were mushrooms, I’d be pretty tired of getting repeatedly rejected by the superficial human passersby who saw my family as carnivorous, dumpster freaks crashing the pristine flora parties.
Olsen also cites another source as inspiration: Not scientific literature, but poetry by Sylvia Plath.
“We are shelves, we are/ Tables, we are meek/ We are edible,” Plath once wrote in her piece, “Mushrooms.” “Nudgers and shovers/ In spite of ourselves/ Our kind multiples. We shall by morning/ Inherit the earth/ Our foot’s in the door.”
Those stanzas are part of a feminist allegory. Plath saw the mushrooms, the American wallflowers of plant life, as metaphorically comparable to women in her experience of 1960s society.
Olsen’s visual work doesn’t force such social commentary. Though it’s, of course, the artist's world that we’re looking at through these pictures, the impression is that Olsen is letting the mushrooms speak for themselves.
