Artists, poets and writers reflect on Olson’s contingency of form and the temporal conditions of cognition within and between her multimedia works
Cast of Mind extends B. Ingrid Olson’s year-long exhibition at i8 Grandi in Reykjavik, where the Chicago-based artist continuously reconfigured the installation in ten successive iterations. Taking this process as a guiding structure, the model of artistic practice as an evolving form is brought into book form and, in Olson’s words, “the attempt to form a hard copy out of something as slippery as a thought process.” The 380-page sequence is an exhibition in and of itself, evidencing Olson’s thought processes as the artworks and their arrangement in space repeat or change, building to a crescendo of simultaneous continuity and dislocation. Newly commissioned writing, along with excerpts from existing texts, is interleaved between images from the original exhibition’s distinct permutations. Playing in time, with continuous, adjusted variations, relations, and encounters, this book casts an exhibition and a thought process that refuses to sit still—ever-changing and ongoing.
Elements, materials, and images are pushed and pulled, slipping in and out of situation. . . . More closely related to a spiral than a line, the permutations of Cast of Mind do not reach culmination and instead tangle into a networked maze, composing an abstraction of both exhibition making and studio processes.
Olson’s work is represented in numerous public collections, and has been featured in solo exhibitions internationally, most recently at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany; fluent, Santander, Spain; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Secession in Vienna. She participated in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and New Photography 2018 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Making books has been a touchstone for her practice, beginning with unique artist’s books and more recently including museum catalogues such as History Mother Little Sister (2023) and 323 (2022).