Installation view of Olivia Erlanger: Spinoff at Luhring Augustine, Tribeca (on view through April 19, 2025)
When you step into Luhring Augustine's Tribeca location, you will feel like an omniscient giant surveying a miniature world, or better yet, a miniature galaxy. This was my impression upon visiting their current solo exhibition, Olivia Erlanger: Spinoff, which had been on my must-see list for quite some time, and it certainly exceeded my expectations. This show features the artist's new works from the last two years that encompass sculpture, sculptural installation, and graphite drawings.
Three massive black boxes containing dioramas of miniaturized, hyper-detailed, fictitious landscapes are each supported on white plinths throughout the one-room gallery. These boxed settings open up to eerily desolate locales with LED lights that bathe the spaces in an overpowering glow: a rusty orange for a deserty, canyon & valley-ridden, Mars-like setting; pale blue for a perspectival garden replete with decorative columns, topiaries, and manicured lawns; and lastly, a sickly green tinged with a slight cyan for a cityscape of futuristic, somewhat Brutalist architecture. Though each setting is wholly distinct, a common thread among them is that they are absent of any sign of life. Not a soul in sight, an uncomfortable feeling that whoever was once there is no more. There are only mere suggestions of prior human engagement - signage, landscaping, and architecture. The press release states that these boxes are examples of Erlanger working “in the language of model-making and dioramas”, which is an apt description, but I want to take this a step further and add “stage-design” to their classification. These worlds-within-containers have a theatricality to their visual display in which the setting of the unknown drama is framed by three sides - stage left, stage right, and an implied proscenium - that faces out into the fourth wall, which is where we stand whilst looking in.
Read full review at whitehotmagazine.com
