Peter Olson
Flatline
May 16 – July 3, 2026
Opening Reception
May 16, 5 – 7PM
Peter Olson (b. 1954) began his photography career in the 1970s when he founded the punk rock magazine, New Sound. Around 2013, he combined his street photography with his highly accomplished wheel-thrown ceramics. Recognizing that simply adding photos to the surface of ceramics was rather commonplace, he invented a narrative form in the tradition of Greek vessels that tell real stories from urban settings, as well and his own mythological/historical inventions. Olson's process involves applying ink transfers of his photographs to his white urn-shaped vessels, achieving the appearance of fine Sèvres porcelain.
In this new exhibition, Flatline, Olson will present works from three ongoing series. In his Flatline series, he photographs “regulars hanging out in Times Square," the outlines of their postures- sitting, standing and lying down on horizontal granite or concrete slabs of architecture reminding him of an EKG pattern. In his Inside Series, the artist has created complex, multi-layered stacks of ceramic elements that precisely combine into forms that resemble Chinese pagodas. Decorated inside and out with tiny skulls, faces and ornate filigree, these vessels are built to be dissected. They come apart in individual pieces that reveal hidden storylines, as well as evidencing Olson’s exceptional skills in hand-throwing perfectly interconnected components. In another series entitled Forgotten in Time, Olson photographs grave portraits, primarily from the 1920s, in cemeteries he has visited in cities from Warsaw to Melbourne. As he describes the images, “not all monuments are maintained. Memories fade, new people are born, families, towns, nations erode and evolve. We find ourselves in the present, left to decode the messages of the past."