In a mountain town in a motel room...

The exhibition Nine Plots, Eight Lodes opens June 15 at Keijiban with an exhibition of two sheets of paper: a transcribed dream in English and its translation into Japanese. This same narrative dream-text serves as the title of one of Olson’s artworks—a painted plaster cast from late 2025. Gesturally brushed and stained with ink, the casting exactingly replicates the form and surface cracks of an antique molded-leather box. Biomorphic nodes and bumps protrude across the form like the head of a bone, softly abstracted by a layer of skin. This cast box is not on view here in Kanazawa; instead, the two sheets of paper stand in as traces of its absence and a prelude to the exhibition’s second chapter.
Opening at Yonkai on July 18, the absent form reappears as a set of eight new painted reliefs installed across the two-room gallery, each a plaster cast of the same soft-edged leather box. Eight more dreams have been recorded and paired as the artworks’ titles. The plaster casts are, again, each painted with ink and stains, as well as wax crayons, colored pencils. The striated, muscular brushstrokes vary on each form in their presence, weight, arrangement and (dis)order. Installed low, at the height of the abdomen, the reliefs invite an encounter that is as corporeal as it is contemplative, their modest scale only deepening the intimacy of their physical presence.