B. Ingrid Olson

VIELLE FILLE

 

Edition

OLD GIRL

available from → https://keijiban.online/en


This edition hints at a work by Francis Picabia entitled “Jeune fille” (“Young Girl”). Created in 1920 for the magazine Proverbe, it consisted of a simple circle die-cut across the publication, accompanied by a double caption: “jeune fille” and “bracelet de la vie” (“bracelet of life”). B. Ingrid Olson refers directly to this work, not only in the use of the cut-out but also in the graphic composition of the upper register, which evokes the partitioned sections of the front page of a newspaper. But despite these formal similarities, the artist takes the counterpoint here, as the title of the edition immediately indicates. Where Picabia pierces a single orifice which, though polysemous, carries a clear reference to the female genital organ and possibly to the voyeurism of the peep-hole, Olson redoubles the gesture and displaces it. The photographs in the lower register underline the association of these two holes with the organ of vision. A vision that, despite our immediate experience, is always double. Moreover, the artist’s parody could also suggests that the two orifices are, in addition to those of the pupils, those of the mask behind which identity is concealed. In any case, the representation of an abstract, essentialized female subject is displaced here, a century later, by that of a concretely present, essentially split body.