New York
In Olivia Erlanger’s recent exhibition, “Spinoff,” a disruptive volley of arrows piercing the upper wall of Luhring Augustine Tribeca’s entry hall and main space lent a mythic spin to intriguing simulacra of a not-quite-natural world. The 16 polished aluminum arrows of Eros (when night was last dark) (2024) refer to Cupid whose quiver, according to Ovid, contains two types of arrows—one to mete out uncontrollable desire and the other to fill a target with revulsion. This reminder that meddling Greek and Roman deities held the power to help and harm in equal measure served here as a celebratory embrace and warning. High up on one wall, a single arrow struck what looked like a satellite (metaphorically setting it alight), while others surrounded a large, hanging sphere covered with houses and several small dioramas placed on plinths, framing and tempering our gaze.
Erlanger’s dioramas, which resemble mock-ups of storyboards for film sets, each encapsulate a closed, hermetic ecosystem in which a single color often provides an interpretive atmosphere and filter. Blue Sky (2024), perhaps the most familiar-seeming of these scenes, established a perspectival line of vision from the entryway, with a central avenue lined with white plinths and pruned green trees leading to a distant vanishing point. Reminiscent of the famous garden set from Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, the world simulated by this model looks both ordinary and surreal, its well-groomed rationality and ordered spaces devoid of human presence blending the past with the present to manifest the desire to control and arrange nature.
Orange Sky (2024) presented an entirely different scenario. While Blue Sky depicts a harmonious, precisely bounded arrangement of nature, this orange-hued landscape, suggesting the otherworldly environment of Mars, describes an arid, wild, dystopian desert with limited options for passage. The omnipresent, fly-by perspective emphasizes the magnitude of the rock formations and the lack of spatial order or human-made containment (except for one small sign on the horizon). Like the large-scale panoramas of 19th-century Romantic painters, this miniaturized space, untamed and hostile, can only be looked upon with awe and trepidation.
Green Sky (2024) resembles a fantastical emerald city. Like a setting from “Star Trek,” this alien place is filled with the Modernist and vaguely futurist buildings—skyscrapers and domed structures—of a post-apocalyptic world. Marking conquest and hegemony with familiar models, the diorama makes visible the hubris of undeterred human ambition, its eerie green atmosphere glowing with toxicity.
The planet-like Prime Meridien (2024) seems more benign. Painted blue and covered with houses and curving roads, this tilting sphere offers what appears to be a reassuring topography. Divided into regions of light and dark by a circular disc, the model teeters on the absurd, overbalanced with its out-of-scale subdivisions and allusions to property and ownership.
Erlanger’s dioramas and models may be colorful and dramatic, but their message is clear. Surrounded by falling arrows, immersed in epic battles, their scenarios of environmental destruction can be ignored only at one’s own risk.
