B. Ingrid Olson: History Mother, Little Sister

A sculptural and photographic dialogue with embodiedness and Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center

This first monograph on the Chicago-based multimedia artist B. Ingrid Olson (born 1987) accompanies two simultaneous exhibitions: History Mother and Little Sister, each on a separate floor of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Informed by notions of doubling and mirroring, unexpected uses of footnotes and architectural fixtures as well as the work of figures such as Madeline Gins and Eileen Gray, the exhibitions insinuate her own objects and images into a sometimes tense, playfully knowing relationship with Le Corbusier’s famous building, probing the normative, gendered and material experiments of the structure’s modular elements of concrete, glass, plywood and primary colors. The book’s innovative design brings together documentation of the site-specific installation, sketches and reproductions of other works made over the last decade, putting them into conversation with a selection of poetry and criticism that informs Olson’s practice.