Emotional Landscapes
Angel Oloshove aims for the sublime with meditative sculptural ceramics and pastel works at form & concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In Emotional Landscapes, Angel Oloshove aims to express the transcendent beauty of Southwestern landscapes in meditative sculptural ceramics as tonally varied as the sunsets and cloudscapes of her state of residence, Texas. A body of pastel works on paper accompanies her characteristic biomorphic forms. Together, these works comprise her first solo exhibition at form & concept.
This new show debuts Angel Oloshove’s contemporary creative process — which builds on her pattern-making technique informed by her experience as a toy developer and designer — through works that are intended as explorations into humanity’s varied emotional reactions to natural landscapes.
One of many scenery-oriented exhibitions for the artist, Emotional Landscapes serves as an encapsulation of her latest study of the romantic idea of the sublime, aesthetic beauty beyond explanation or measurement that is both breathtaking and terrifying. In what could be called a revival of 19th-century romanticism, Oloshove hopes to celebrate nature’s ability to inspire authentic emotion in her artwork. Inspired by natural phenomena, her cloud-like sculptures and airy pastel works may serve as material distillations of subjective experience and symbolic bridges between ineffability and mortality.
But Oloshove aims to remain critical of sentimentalization in her work, as idealizing natural phenomena can diminish, and perhaps destroy, the unnameable quality of majestic spaces that stir human emotion. Colloquially known as the “Land of Enchantment” in the tourism industry, New Mexico itself can be viewed as a romanticized state that typifies the moral and ethical questions surrounding the commodification of natural landscapes that Emotional Landscapes seeks to address.
The intended tension between aesthetic purity and alluded syrupy, commercial sentimentalism is best captured by the exhibition’s use of railroad ties as artwork pedestals. The installation features the artist’s dream-like works resting on rough, utilitarian forms — a textural representation of two incongruous schools of thought, romanticism, and industrialism. At the center of the ideological conflict between art and industry that the exhibition tries to uncover are Oloshove’s functional ceramics, works that hope to satisfy the universal need for utility and beauty.
Emotional Landscapes is on view from June 30 through August 20 at form & concept in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
For more information, visit formandconcept.center.
