Opening letters from my mother...

Name: Opening letters from my mother... - B. Ingrid Olson
Brand: Keijiban
Availability: InStock

B. Ingrid Olson

2025-2026

Full title: Opening letters from my mother. Her script wraps around the brownish envelope in a spiral. The words become smaller and smaller as it goes around. I need a magnifying glass to read the microscript, but I don’t have one. The inside of the envelope contains a necklace and a very long stud earring which is more like a nail. There is also a patchwork wallet inside, made of fake leather. It has a little grainy photograph, and some clippings of quotes inside. There is also a keychain with two charms on it: a snake and a family name. We are renovating a house in the middle of nowhere. When I try to walk around the house, it transforms into a complex maze.

Gypsum cement, colored pencil, graphite, crayon, ink, acrylic ink

17 x 10.8 x 6.4 cm

Unique

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The edition

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.

The artist

B. Ingrid Olson B・イングリッド・オルソン — Photo by John Henderson

B. Ingrid Olson was born in 1987 in Denver. She lives in Chicago.

B. Ingrid Olson’s work can take photographic, sculptural or architectural forms, but it is through the medium of her own body that she explores the relationships our bodies can have with certain spaces or objects. She sheds light on the way we experience presence or absence, coincidence or split. In short, she probes the philosophical question posed by Spinoza: “What can bodies do?”

Her meticulously composed images incorporate anatomical fragments, telescoping different visual planes through the use of mirrors and flashes, cut-outs and superimpositions. Here, we experience a body that is both situated and dislocated, perceived and perceiving. Her sculptures and installations extend this experience by deploying objects and structures in which the organic and the mechanical merge, taking the form of psycho-formed casts or prostheses, and sometimes of larger structures in which the visitor’s body is involved through the displacement or reversal of perspectives.

Her work is represented by i8 Gallery (Reykjavik) and Croy Nielsen (Vienna)

The exhibition