Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow is the artist’s first solo museum presentation in the United States. Across an installation, a video, and a series of commissioned sculptures, Erlanger continues her decade-long disruption of the “semiotics of suburbia.” In her practice, Erlanger thinks of the home as a greater ecosystem containing not only houses but also their surrounding infrastructures and interior architectures.
At Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), massive illuminated planet sculptures map the suburban landscape, positioning the development of home as an environmental force in itself. These new works explore “speculative memory”—how progress can only be understood through hindsight—and what this psychic limitation implies for the artist. Viewers will then move to new diorama sculptures that play on an institutional language of presentation, positioning the enclosed scenes as already-past. Here, Erlanger proposes both impossible architectures and terrestrial forms created using strategies of model-making. These works are each marked by changes in season, emphasizing receding memories of a once-diverse climate.
The exhibition culminates in a sitcom set, riffing on the psychology of interiors as well as acting as a platform to watch Erlanger’s new short film Appliance. The film dovetails recent research into the history and cultural significance of domestic technologies, such as the shower or washing machine, with a specific focus on how their operations have been considered interchangeably with human bodily functions. In our age of “polycrisis,” wherein multiple seismic events occur simultaneously, If Today Were Tomorrow provides a framework for thinking about the porousness of interior and exterior, self and non-self, body and home.
Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Hatje Cantz containing newly commissioned texts about the artist’s practice, as well as contributions focusing on the interplay between architecture, psychology, and science fiction.
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Image caption: Olivia Erlanger, 38.917310027627 N x -77.22183907758908 W, 2021. Silicone, aluminum, LED Lights, transformer, and cables. 30 x 18.5 x 15 inches. Courtesy Soft Opening.
Artist Bio
Olivia Erlanger (b. 1990, New York) lives and works in New York. Through her sculpture, writing, and filmmaking, Erlanger explores American dreams and delusions. Recent and forthcoming solo and two-person exhibitions include If Today Were Tomorrow at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2024); Humour in the Water Coolant at ICA London (2024); Appliance at Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna (2022); Home is a Body at Soft Opening, London (2020); Split-level Paradise at Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2020); Ida at Motherculture, Los Angeles (2018); Poison Remedy Scapegoat at Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018); and mouths filled with pollen at And Now, Dallas (2018). Notable group exhibitions include Nonmemory at Hauser Wirth, Los Angeles (2023); Dream Journal at Company Gallery, New York (2023); On Failure, at Soft Opening, London (2023); The Heavy Light Show at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Shell at Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles (2022); The Kick Inside at Museum X, Shanghai (2022); Liquid Life at Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker (2021); Psychosomatic at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2021); In Situ at Marianne Boesky, New York (2021); Winterfest at Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2020); Haunted Haus at Swiss Institute, New York (2020); DIS Presents: What do people do all day? at Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2020); No Space, Just a Place at Daelim Museum, Seoul (2020); and For a Dreamer of Houses at Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas (2020).
Erlanger is the author of Appliance (Wild Seeds, 2022) and, with architect Luis Ortega Govela, the co-author of Garage (MIT Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in publications including Tank Magazine, PIN UP, Flash Art, and Harvard Design Magazine, and a forthcoming catalog essay through Spector Books in 2024. Erlanger’s work is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; KADIST, San Francisco, California; X Museum, Shanghai, China; among others.
Support
Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow has been made possible by the patrons, benefactors and donors to CAMH’s Major Exhibition Fund: Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, Sissy and Denny Kempner, Dillon Kyle and Sam Lasseter, MD Anderson Foundation, Rea Charitable Trust, Louisa Stude Sarofim, The Sarofim Foundation, and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
