Leanne Olson: With All Things Considered

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Leanne Olson, "#yegbrick (detail)," 2019

digital photograph. Courtesy of the Artist.

Leanne Olson: With All Things Considered

ARTIST TALK  - Friday, November 8, 4 - 5 p.m.

In the deluge of images that represent the scale of overconsumption that defines late capitalism, Leanne Olson’s photography and video-based work refuses a totalizing view. We are denied the monumental, awe-filled nihilistic feeling that comes from viewing an elegant aestheticizing of what we have disposed. Instead we are set amongst the ruins to contend with our impulse to reinscribe meaning onto the decaying objects otherwise rendered unintelligible. Waste gets removed from most systems of value when it disappears from our lives each garbage day, and yet it still exists outside of meaning as well as beyond our vision, sometimes in perpetuity. As we grapple with our inability to relate to the massive scale of late capitalist consumption, Olson’s work calls us to look closely and tenderly as we reinscribe our abject consumption with meaning.

With All Things Considered features work Leanne Olson created while artist in residence at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre. Curated by Carolyn Jervis. 

Leanne Olson is an exhibiting artist and community arts facilitator. Olson has a BA in Film Studies from the University of Alberta and has maintained a photography practice since childhood. During the last five years, Olson’s work has focused on land and water bodies that are tasked with jobs: landfills, sulphurous springs, and recreational lakes. Her practice includes repeated visitation and documentation of these sites as they are entangled in massive change. The subjects in her images are often micro captures of ecosystems adapting to human odds and responding to the effects of time. Since 2017, she has been in a series of intensive artist residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Artscape on Toronto Island, and most recently she held a one-year position as the first Artist in Residence at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre. Olson’s research has continued in 2019 through a summer program called Museum for Future Fossils at New York University and Western University, and this autumn she will be attending the University of Victoria where she is pursuing her Master of Visual Arts degree.