B. Ingrid Olson: A Masculine Thought: Midway Contemporary Art

The exhibition includes two artworks: Fraternal Canon (What I would be if I wasn’t what I am before I was I), n.d. and A Feminine Thought, 2007-2025. First exhibited in June 2025 at Kunstverein Braunschweig and conceived of as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork", A Feminine Thought was spread across the first floor of the Villa Salve Hospes, fluidly filling the eight rooms with the sole artwork. Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total artwork", is a work of art or other constructed experience that combines as many mediums as possible into a coherent whole. Popularized (and problematized) by the composer Richard Wagner, the principles of the Gesamtkunstwerk are often embodied by architecture, with practitioners such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright controlling every element of their buildings.

For Midway, Olson has reconfigured and translated the large-scale artwork in response to the present architectural situation. Condensed not only into a single room, but into one half of the gallery space, the installation’s 527 tabletops are stacked directly on the floor into a tight and dense configuration, backed up against a long wall. The black laminate panels are scaled to the dimensions of every artwork made by the artist to date. A kind of shadow oeuvre, these rectilinear surrogates actually and metaphorically support an array of sculptural forms, drawings, and assemblage. 

Grafted onto the existing steel beam that bisects Midway’s gallery space, Olson has installed four steel and fogged-glass partitions which simulate the transition between an interior and exterior space. 70 small photographic collages are scattered and taped across the interior surface of the glass. An installation of steel light fixtures, Fraternal Canon (What I would be if I wasn’t what I am before I was I), n.d., distantly backlights the photographic elements. In the liminal ‘outside’, the lights theatrically perform as artificial sunlight.