Auxier Kline is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Emila Olsen, The View From the Boat, featuring a survey of paintings and works on paper created by the Brooklyn based artist over the past year. 

The View From the Boat casts the viewer as someone standing on the deck of a vessel, trying to decide what they see in the waters below. These works feature motifs of traditional deep sea folklore; mermaids, sirens, nymphs, and sea witches. These fantastical feminine sea creatures are personifications of the artist’s emotional states. Olsen celebrates these deities in bodily form, empowering them with their magical abilities to survive the perils and dangers they are faced with, and by doing so, makes the viewer ruminate on what it truly means to be “monstrous”. 

Olsen’s newest body of work continues her investigation of the psyche by visually processing her personal experiences as a form of meditation. Through this process, Olsen has built a language consisting of a now familiar iconography that’s based on personal history, and influenced by her relationships with literature, music, mythology, and art history. The culmination of these influences create a pictorial diary-like reference for the viewer as to what the artist was experiencing at the time of the work’s conception and creation. 

This past year my practice has been about embracing the hopeful / magical, and the balance that self empowerment brings to the everyday and the circumstantial. This general timeline feels especially stormy, and these works are like a version of myself that’s able to face these times. - Emilia Olsen 

Emilia Olsen  (Born 1989, South Africa (North American) Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY). Olsen received her Bachelor Fine Arts, Corcoran College of Art & Design, Washington, DC, 2011.  Recent solo and two person exhibitions include What Lies Beneath,  with CJ Chueca, Kates-Ferri Projects, New York, NY, Blue, curated by Emily McElreath, Spring Break Art Show, New York, NY, What The Poet Said To The Painter, Pegasus Prints, Brooklyn, NY, 2020, Crying In Public, with Logan T Sibrel, Auxier Kline, New York, NY. 2019