Olivia Mole

“Sotto in Sù: Dopesheet Batman S7” (2024)

Picnic blanket with spray paint; Barrina™ T5 lights; Micca™ media player; powered speaker property of DreamWorks Animation; extension cable; Poly-fil™; “ Nocturne No 19 in E minor Opus 72 No.1” (Chopin, played from memory by Elisa Iturbe in the woods, Peterborough NH 2024)

Working across disciplines Olivia Mole’s work refuses a single interpretation but returns repeatedly to the banquet of discarded cultural DNA using distinctive materials and installation strategies to blur the embodiment of memory.

Below are her notes:

The work’s title “Sotto in Su” is from the Latin “below, upward.”
Now the sky has fallen and we look down on it.

Instead of the tradition of trompe l'oeil painting, now the cloud is a sort of failed minimalist sculpture: as soon as this version of the cloud hits the deck it becomes a piece of literalist theater.

But it’s also stupid, a folly, a pile of poly-fil, it has neither absorption nor theatricality. Instead of a surface so slick that it repels meaning (minimalism), the surface is grabby and soft, it absorbs meaning.

The “Dopesheet Batman” of the title contextualizes the work in a broader project centered around a looney tunes “Dopesheet,” the term used for a spread-sheet designed to organize and establish the timing in animation. The dopesheet itself, prosaic and provisional, refuses the optics of representation: there’s no image here, just data, just cartoon DNA.

Only in “Sotto Su” the cloud has forgotten its own DNA and there’s no “Dopesheet” at all, and not even any of the signifiers from the project. Pop has eaten itself… what remains is now just the idea of a vaporous cloud that has sunk (it’s 20lb of Poly-fil, not vapor, of course it can’t float)

Emerging from beneath the cloud are strains of Chopin played blindfolded and from memory, a frail loop, gradually disintegrating. This overly sentimental phrase haunts our recurring dream of nostalgia, incompleteness and failure.

Entropy is supposed to be the arrow of time. But what does it mean to imagine its is instead static, or looped, or foiled (or fooled)?

By laying out these elements of editing time manifests the ideal of the dope sheet as a control mechanism that is now just stuffing guts of detritus and cultural imaginary (also true of the Chopin).. beautiful in its imperfect remembrance.



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https://www.oliviamole.org/