Alina Tenser on Olga Balema
Olga Balema: The third dimension, Installation Views — November 18, 2023 - January 13, 2024. Photos by Gregory Carideo.Images courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC
It takes some acclimating to see Olga Balema’s transparent pieces in "The Third Dimension" at Bridget Donahue gallery. As my vision narrows in on one, I start to see the shimmering edges of other pieces populating. They hover in an ungrounded way contradictory to how sculpture typically behaves. Given that the polycarbonate works are almost invisible, the title of the show can be read as a direct assertion of the work’s three-dimensionality or a flat quip.After all, how does one reconcile the third dimension with an absence of mass?
As long as I’ve been an artist, I've identified as a sculptor; even my performances and videos fall under that umbrella. However, I look at painters with admiration for their refusal of gravity and other material problems; they can will something to be, and it is: a purple squiggle floating in the middle of a canvas, a luminous bare shoulder touched by morning light, etc. When sculptors attempt that kind of thing, there can be a tired, cringy residue of illusion in it (sometimes rescued through humor and a certain self-consciousness). Balema’s pieces have the curious glow of illusion but are actually simple executions with an ordinary, if industrial, material. Several of the pieces have paint and marks and, like in my painter-magician fantasy, these marks float on the transparent surfaces, further obscuring the work’s form and aesthetic.
Olga Balema, Loop 51125, 2023, Polycarbonate sheeting, acrylic paint, solvent, 15 × 19 × 56 in. (38.10 × 48.26 × 142.24 cm.Images courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC
Made out of folded and synched polycarbonate sheeting, the pieces are nebulous; their edges and dimensionality appearing mutable and their connection to the floorunconvincing. Up close, it is their folds and seams that ground them in reality, revealing a kind of tactile struggle of the fingertips, a sure presence of a tinkerer’s ingenuity and fallibility. It is here that I think about their titles. (Each one is entitled "Loop" with a given number.) When I try to grasp their forms from afar, they appear as slightly-off cuboids. At an intimate distance, however, there is much variation – pinched curves, sharp folds that extend to material that crumples or slumps into the clear interior, resembling an irregularly shaped wrapped gift. With their titles in mind, I think about the logic of making a loop, a circuit, a Möbius strip, and the rudimentary magic of transforming a flat sheet of material into a 3-dimensional volume.
Alina Tenser, Walking In Circles With Sharp Corners, 2023, video still. Image courtesy of the artist and HESSE FLATOW
Alina Tenser is a Ukrainian-born artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Working across sculpture, performance, and video, she makes propositions that elicit physical activation, transference, and play. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with recent solo exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, New York, NY; SE Cooper Contemporary, Portland, OR; Konstepidemin, Gothenburg, SE; and Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Tenser is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Lehigh University. She has two upcoming solo shows:“Circles with Sharp Corners” at HESSE FLATOW, February 29- March 30“Wrk Frm Hm” at Kino Saito, March 9 - May 4