Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities

by Rebecca Olsen

SRISA Gallery, Florence, Italy

SRISA Gallery is hosting Rebecca Olsen’s installation and drawing collaborative: Invisible Cities from 3 March - 8 April. Olsen was born in Florence to American parents and raised in both Texas and Tuscany. These two worlds have shaped her work and interest in utilizing art to better comprehend the different cultures she inhabits.

The works in the show were born from her previous exhibition “River of Consciousness” exhibited last year at the Hunt Gallery in St. Louis, February 2021. She used that exhibition as a point of departure for Invisible Cities and the work seen throughout SRISA’s exhibition hall and gallery consists of several paintings, sculptures, and videos that take inspiration from that show.

In the entrance of the building the audience has the opportunity to participate in a collaborative drawing designed to engage them with the artist’s process. Her relationship to line and form is both personal to her history and a way of translating thoughts, transcribing memory, and focusing attention. She sees all her work as drawing: thus, her desire to engage people with the intimacy of the medium.

Olsen’s pieces exhibited in the gallery create an immersive experience. One can handle the wood block sculptures, and is invited to look, listen, and engage with the work itself. At the entrance of the gallery clip boards and drawing materials are available and the audience is encouraged to draw. The artist’s desire is that the exhibition underlines the role the gallery serves as both a promoter of art and as a tool to inspire and teach those who study in the school.

In Invisible Cities, Olsen explores process, engagement, and personal history. The works for invisible cities offer an insight into how we map, create, elaborate, destroy, and eventually re-elaborate those processes. The city as a metaphor for the human experience and the transience of time and space with the incapacity to hold any one moment frozen in time. A process she sees as akin to the ever-evolving city.

As Olsen developed the art for this exhibition a new work emerged in the creation of a grid of 25x25 cm. paintings on wood. Olsen began to expand this piece beyond the boundaries of the frame through the creation of a mental map. In this piece inspired by the details of her work the artist began to explore personal forms by utilizing both her old and newer works as well as drawings from her artist mother’s work.

She believes the maps have led her back to the self, and as a result she has discovered themes that connect through her entire career. By making art, she has discovered her world of forms, icons and influences that have helped her translate her past into new works of art. A process that has additionally encouraged her to invite the audience to participate in the completion of the exhibition.