Erik Olson

Rhythm in Chaos

Erik Olson is a young Canadian artist in the midst of a six-month motorcycle trip around India. The steps that led him to take such a journey are fascinating.

In 2005 Olson graduated from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver. Afterwards he vacationed in Honduras, staying on the island of Roatan off the northern coast of the country. The trip proved instrumental in jumpstarting his work. “During that time,” the Calgary native explains, “I started becoming interested in the vernacular architecture that they have there, these beautiful, multi-coloured shacks made of all these different pieces of wood. Each piece of wood is a different colour and they come together in these very unusual buildings. It was at that time that I became interested in this idea of assemblage, that there is a beauty in diversity and a beauty in these distinguished multiple parts coming together to create a cohesive whole.”


Erik Olson. 'Rolando Stevenson's House', 2005.

With this fresh inspiration, Olson went off to test the concept of ‘assemblage’ in various settings, heading first to the complex urban environments of New York City and London. In much the same way that he felt the assorted colours on the shacks in Honduras congealed brilliantly to reveal unique beauty, he began to fuse together in his work the seemingly jumbled multiplicity of building designs and colours in the cities, locating new potential for unity. He shifted from thinking on the limited scale of one building to the far grander plane of an entire city.


Erik Olson. 'Model City', 2007.

Next Olson sought to explore rural Alberta and British Columbia, beginning a project in 2007 that charted the mountain pine beetle infestations in the area. “Again there I saw that similar sort of ‘shack pattern’, but this time it was on a landscape level,” he recalls. “It was fragmented clear-cuts creating forms of the red, dead pine trees killed by the pine beetle, and then intersections of green spruce. There is a sort of fragmentation and chaos, but there’s also a beauty to this.” Throughout this undertaking he visited remote areas regularly where industry confronted the natural world. “In most of the paintings,” he says, “you can see the red trees around the periphery, but there is this colourful blue machinery in the foreground that is related to the pine beetle, logging equipment and all that. I was interested in the whole network of landscape change that was related to the pine beetle issue.”


Erik Olson. 'In a Full World', 2007.

Following his initial breakthrough in Honduras, and on the heels of his imaginative work in both urban and rural settings, Olson determined that he would travel to India, continuing to explore the idea of identifying cohesion in diversity. He clarifies his thinking in the following way: “So I look at a place like India that, from what I understand, is made up of very different fragmented parts, but it seems to be pieced together, making this rich and diverse culture. I thought that I could jump from the landscape level to the scale of a country, a massive region.”

The following interview breaks down into two parts, capturing in rare fashion the thoughts of an artist in process. Part one is a conversation that took place by phone early in March 2010, the night before Olson jetted off from Calgary to south Asia. Part two is a discussion carried out a month and a half later via email from India, in which the painter describes what he has discovered during his travels.

No doubt Olson will continue to refine his ideas and the scope of his work. His talent lies in recognizing order and beauty in scenes of apparent confusion and chaos. To the observer, it seems that perhaps he is systematically portraying rural and urban landscapes in order to mirror and test the shifts in sense perception unleashed on human beings by rapid technological change. New modes of communication have disrupted national and regional cultures. Old patterns of social, economic, and political organization are crumbling. Is it possible that Olson is training his audience to behold the mass disintegration of obsolete ways of ordering things in the hope that we might begin to identify new sources of cohesion? In this sense a shack in Honduras may be as significant as one square mile in Manhattan.

The interview here begins with Olson talking about his experience at the Olympic games in Vancouver, where he assisted renowned artist Gordon Halloran with the installation of an enormous ice-painting at City Hall in Richmond, British Columbia.

PART ONE:
PHONE INTERVIEW FROM CALGARY, ALBERTA

CI: Let us begin with your most recent project. You have been working for a number of years with Gordon Halloran to produce ice-painting installations, most recently for the Olympics in Vancouver. How well did all that come together during the Games?

EO: Well, it was a mad, mad rush as usual. I’ve been working with Gordon since the 2006 Olympics in Torino. That’s when we first started working together. It’s always a pleasure and a challenge to work with Gordon. As much as there is a plan to the whole thing and a rationale, he’s very intuitive and spontaneous. Being his assistant, it’s just a matter of keeping up, really.

Every time that I’ve worked with him it’s been very different. The first time was in this bombed-out seventeenth century cathedral. Then we did an installation in Toronto in Nathan Phillips Square, and another one in Chicago in Millennium Park. This time we were working in this fish locker with minus twenty-eight degree temperatures. Just the temperature difference alone created a lot of problems, but it also created opportunities. Working in his spontaneous way, we just sort of adapted to the new circumstances, making work that was thicker and had more of a machismo to it compared to previous exhibitions. In the end, it all came together. It was a wild ride as usual. But there we were at the opening, and I’m watching him do his speech and just catch his eye for one moment. We just smiled at each other and kind of laughed – because ‘here we are, we’ve pulled it off one more time’.

[Have a look at the history of the project at www.paintingsbelowzero.com]

CI: Apart from working in a very cold space in order to colour the ice, what is the main difficulty in working with ice as the medium for this type of major installation?

EO: It’s very fragile. It’s very precious and subtle in a certain way, when you get up close to the work. Part of the magic of working with the ice is that the pigment sits on the crystal structure of the ice as it freezes so you get these beautiful, abstract patterns that are infinitely complex. There’s that fragile quality to it, and of course it’s very easily breakable. It’s a balance between trying to keep the work in these large sheets, and also allow it to break at times. It’s the give-and-take. When do you care if a piece breaks? When is a piece precious, and when can you allow it to break?

We’re working on such a massive scale. The painting was one hundred feet long by fourteen feet high. As much as you allow these uncertainties to run because that creates some of the excitement in working with it, you also know at the end of the day that you have a hundred feet that you have to cover. There’s that pressure there of allowing things to change, but also keeping it in control at times.

CI: As you mentioned, you’ve been working with Gordon Halloran since the Olympics in Torino in 2006. How did that connection with him initially come about for you?

EO: I was just graduating from the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver in 2005. He came to the grad show and saw some of my work. At that point he said, ‘I’m putting this project together in Torino – do you want to come?’ So I said ‘yes!’

After I graduated, I went to Honduras for a while and did a painting project there, and then swooped back and met him in Italy. At that point, I didn’t really know him that well, and wasn’t really sure what I was getting myself into. I was mixing his colours, and there was instantly a real connection. He would say, ‘kind of mix a sky, a cayenne-blue’. I would go back and mix something up, and he would be like, ‘alright, that’s it, cool, let’s pour it.’ At times, it’s maybe a guessing game in terms of what he’s thinking and trying to work with that, but it does seem that we have a visual language we can communicate with. It’s a good working relationship in that sense.

CI: After returning home to Calgary from Vancouver, you are taking off for six months to tour India by motorcycle. How did this particular venture get started, and what are your goals?

EO: Well, as I said, after I graduated I headed down to Honduras. I was living in this small fishing village called Oak Ridge on the island of Roatan just off Honduras. During that time, I started becoming interested in the vernacular architecture that they have there, these beautiful, multi-coloured shacks made of all these different pieces of wood. Each piece of wood is a different colour and they come together in these very unusual buildings. It was at that time that I became interested in this idea of ‘assemblage’, that there is a beauty in diversity and a beauty in these distinguished multiple parts coming together to create a cohesive whole.

That got me going. From there I travelled on to other areas, to New York City and London, and I started seeing a similar sort of rhythm in New York City, for example, but on a much larger scale. Instead of the shack as a building, I was looking at the shack but it was the whole city, where each building was its own distinguished piece making up this rich and exciting whole. Then I came back to Canada in 2007 and started a project where I motorcycled around Alberta and British Columbia documenting the mountain pine beetle infestations. Again there I saw that similar sort of ‘shack pattern’ but this time it was on a landscape level. It was fragmented clear-cuts creating forms of the red, dead pine trees killed by the pine beetle, and then intersections of green spruce. There is a sort of fragmentation and chaos, but there’s also a beauty to this.

So I look at a place like India that, from what I understand, is made up of very different fragmented parts, but it seems to be pieced together, making this rich and diverse culture. I thought that I could jump from the landscape level to the scale of a country, a massive region. Motorcycling is one of my loves. I thought that I could put the two together. I feel confident that, once I get out in the field, as in previous projects, the subject matter will present itself. The unforeseen circumstances may certainly lead to some interesting paintings.

That’s how it all started. When I get out there, it’s uncertain, but that’s part of the magic of it, pushing to that level of uncertainty and seeing what happens.

CI: Are you going to be travelling on your own mostly in India, or do you have someone that you’ll be with while touring around?

EO: No, I’ll be travelling alone. I like to travel solo. Of course, there are many people in India, so I certainly won’t be alone!

It seems that, for me anyway, it’s the best way that I can connect with my surroundings. You put yourself in a situation where you don’t have your family and friends around you, so you have to reach out and get connected with the local community. That’s often the best way to get at least an impression of a place. But then in Delhi I’ll be participating in this residency. I hope to learn from other Indian artists there, and participate in that kind of dialogue.

CI: It’s an interesting trajectory that you’ve described here, beginning in Honduras, bringing ideas back to Canada, and now going to India. Where did the initial drive come from to go down to Honduras?

EO: I finished school and I just needed a bit of time on the beach, really. It started out as simple as that. My family had some connections down in Honduras, so that got me going. My father is a landscape architect. So it was as simple as just wanting to get away, but when I got down there, all of a sudden the architecture of this village just blew my mind. It was one of the most exciting built environments that I had ever been to. Again, when you get out into these environments, the world has a way of surprising you.

CI: Well it’s interesting as one looks at the different projects, beginning with the pieces from Honduras, and moving ahead especially to the work from the series called Assemblages, I wouldn’t have put that together, the idea that the different colours on the shacks in Honduras started to drive this vision that you then found in other places. The pieces in Assemblages – those were the ones that most immediately struck me when I looked at them. There are crowd scenes, some urban landscapes, and a very unique use of colour. What were the origins of the subject matter in that project? It seems like a mixture.

EO: You’re right. It’s a mixture of different types of images from all over the world. I was interested in the massive population growth that I was witnessing, and then trying to express that in architectural forms. The structure that a massive crowd makes, or even just a flimsy add-on to a building in New York City; there is diversity and beauty that I see in all that. Really it was just the structure of the paintings that was holding all that work together.


Erik Olson. 'Collapse', 2008.

CI: You mentioned that taking motorcycle trips is a love for you, even outside art. What is your bike of choice?

EO: Oh, the Royal Enfields that they have in India – that’s the real reason that I’m going to India! The Enfields are timeless. The bike that I’m going to be riding is pretty much to spec to the nineteen forties bikes that the British first brought over there. More than anything, it’s so simple. It’s an engine with two wheels. I love the experience of travelling through the landscape, but you feel every foot! Every foot of air that you blast through, you feel it on your body. I love the simplicity of no windshield, just right out there, experiencing it all.

CI: To pull back for a moment to the one project that you mentioned earlier, riding around in B.C. and Alberta and tracing the mountain pine beetle – that’s an interesting thing to base a collection of paintings around. Looking at those paintings, there is a frontier aspect to it, where we see some industrial landscapes at the edge of the natural environments. Did that idea just strike you when you heard about the mountain pine beetle infestation, and you figured that you could tour around and trace the impact of it?

EO: It came from motorcycling back and forth between Vancouver and Calgary. One year I noticed that the mountainside was coloured red, and just the colour really struck me. I’m very influenced by colour. The more that I started looking into it, and talking to scientists, to see what was really going on, I realized that it was on a scale that was unprecedented, and it was drastically changing the interior forests of B.C. and Alberta. The project began as a way to explore that space and just literally see what was happening, to trace around it. As I did that, I saw the huge impact that the mountain pine beetle had, but as I traced that path, I also noticed what was really most full of impact and colourful was the industrial quality to the landscape. I started finding all these industrial places where I was searching for the pine beetle. In most of the paintings, you can see the red trees around the periphery, but there is this colourful blue machinery in the foreground that is related to the pine beetle, logging equipment and all that. I was interested in the whole network of landscape change that was related to the pine beetle issue. Again, it was picking something very specific to follow, the pine beetle, but when you do that, it opens up into much bigger subject matter. It allows me to paint everything that I experience, which I like. It gives me a way of finding value in what I’m experiencing, I guess.

CI: The ‘shack technique’ that you developed when you were in Honduras, and this idea that you came to of finding beauty through fragmentation – as you collect these ideas as you travel around, are there other artists, or maybe novelists, poets, and musicians, that you have come across where you find a similar theme in their work? That idea of fragmented culture, and somehow seeing beauty in it, is really interesting given how we all communicate now and how fragmented we are socially.

EO: Certainly the idea of ‘assemblage’ is influenced by an artist like Louise Nevelson, compiling these very small parts to create this wonderful whole, or by Robert Rauschenberg. But I’m also interested in Canadian artists who are watching this landscape change happen and the fragmentation that is related to it. Artists like Kim Dorland - I worked with him earlier this summer, and he’s a big influence, I would say. Even artists like Chris Millar – I think of his work as Canadian landscape made up of all these cut-out, comic book style paintings, but they’re all just sort of jammed together, all pushed together into one sprawling painting space. I think artists like that are really who I’m looking at. To be honest, more than anything, someone like Bob Dylan is the biggest influence, just the idea of getting out on the road and seeing what comes at you, and taking that for inspiration.

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PART TWO:
EMAIL INTERVIEW FROM KANNIYAKUMARI, INDIA

CI: When we first spoke, you outlined the unique trajectory that your work has taken, beginning with the shacks in Honduras that sparked the idea of seeing cohesiveness in diversity, and taking that thought derived from those shacks and translating it to large rural and urban landscapes. Your hope was that you might be able to build on all that with a trip to India, to find cohesion in the diversity of a massive and complex country. Have you found that, to this point, your experience in India has permitted this to work?

EO: I’ve now travelled down from Mumbai to the southernmost point of India. I’m currently sitting on a rooftop overlooking Kanniyakumari, the place where three seas meet. It’s the site where Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes were sprinkled so it seems like a fitting location to try to answer your question.

So far, India has provided all the diversity, all the shocking contradictions and bursting colour that I had hoped to find. Each neighborhood, city and region is unique and distinct with its own customs, artistic traditions, and often its own language. In the city of Mumbai you’ll see two new buildings being constructed. One is of a contemporary, modernist-influenced style with right angles, concrete, glass and steel. Right next to it, literally inches away, there will be a ramshackle building going up. The structure is built entirely by hand with ropes fastening pieces of wood, bamboo and reused materials together; a total mix of available resources. How could these two seemingly polarized realities be created within inches of each other and at the same time? There are thousands of similar examples. It suggests that India is cohesive and positively developing, yet also a dysfunctional mash-up.

Perhaps the contradictions that exist within a single city or country should not be so surprising. As individual people we have multiple identities. Each one of us embodies many different roles at any given moment. A person can be an Albertan, a Canadian, a motorcyclist, a lover of art, a blue-eyed person, a brother and a traveller all at the same time. The idea of self is constructed from many differing parts. The roles that we take on during the course of one day are many and varied. When we define our identity in this plural way, it’s possible to see overlapping similarities with other people and relate to our common struggles.

In India this type of diversity and plurality is everywhere you look. I’m not suggesting that what I’ve witnessed in the cities of India is ideal, but I believe there’s something to be learned here. Perhaps in the close proximity of rich and poor, new and old, there exists a greater possibility to express the human condition. So although I’m overwhelmed by the complexity here, I think it’s good for me and it’s challenging my work. It’s a welcomed push. My travels here have been, on a much grander scale, quite comparable to when I first saw that shack in Honduras. It’s beautiful with all the contrasting colours, yet disturbing in the harsh realities of human life.

CI: Just in terms of the travel itself, what has been the most challenging aspect of motorcycling around India? What has been your most interesting personal encounter?

EO: The challenge of motorcycling in India comes in many forms, whether it’s finding the narrow gap to squeeze between oncoming trucks or navigating the maze of winding shantytown streets. Much like making a drawing, you just have to pick your line and stick with it. It’s dealing with the unknown that has provided the greatest challenge for me, and it’s a constant struggle to remain calm in the midst of such uncertainty.

My first encounter with the city of Mumbai still has my mind swirling. It was a full dose, a city of sixteen million and counting. When I first flew in, there was so much ahead and I was downright terrified. As I took a cab from the airport we passed hundreds of people sleeping out on the dark, broken pavement. I inhaled thick, humid air as the cab navigated through a maze of crumbling buildings surrounded by darkness. The idea of motorcycling the country at that point seemed ridiculous. Standing at the gateway of India I asked myself ‘how am I going to do this?’ We learn from an early age to fear the unknown. When the unknown is outside of your familiar cultural experience it can become unjustifiably terrifying. I began to wonder whether to move ahead at all.

The next morning I quietly crept to the doorway of the hotel and looked out. I felt like a young teenager again, on the edge of a skateboard half-pipe and looking down for the first time. A short walk outside to have a chai unexpectedly turned into a full-fledged tour of the city. In one day, it was no longer a question of if I could do the project; it was happening. Mumbai had inhaled me.

In the first week I travelled all over the city, riding the Bombay trains way out to the northern suburbs in search of a bike. At certain stations there would be a mad rush of people, pushing and shoving as hundreds poured onto the trains. Eventually I found the Premjis road area, heart of the Mumbai biker scene. I wandered narrow motorcycle-lined streets, trash filled alleyways with ox-driven carts passing by. With sweat pouring down I bounced from one shop to the next, trying to recall from which direction I had entered the place. It was suffocating at first but eventually I just allowed myself to enjoy it. I laid back and let the streets of Mumbai carry me along.

In the evenings I would sit up on the rooftops of Colaba and watch the traffic below, trying to figure it out. At first it seemed hopeless. Individual traffic lanes are non-existent and there is no clear right-of-way. Cars and bikes narrowly miss pedestrians, cows and goats. However, the longer I watched, I started to see a certain rhythm in what initially appeared to be total chaos. There’s an intuitive quality to the driving here, not so dissimilar to painting. It’s about communicating without speaking. With simple gestures, sounding of horns and swerving this way and that, there's a dialogue. I started picking up on something important that I couldn’t see at first. The drivers are in it together. They may be looking out for themselves, but by doing so they’re also looking out for one another. I started seeing the movement of cars through the streets like blood cells travelling through veins. You can’t over-think it. You have to just go with the flow. It was an intense moment the first time I got on the Royal Enfield motorcycle, felt the thump of the engine and pulled out into the Bombay traffic. In a moment I was immersed in the streams of vehicles, I was one of them, floating down an artery of the city.

Date of Interview: 04/24/2010
Location: By phone from Calgary, by email from India
Link: www.erikolson.ca