Olivia Mole
May - June 2021
Olivia Mole is an artist based in Los Angeles who uses various practices including installation, performance, animation, drawing and VR. She reuses material from theory, history, and pop culture to create scenarios and tableaux exploring contemporary crises of personhood and social life.
Mole worked in mainstream animation for a decade and is interested in how entertainment logic parallels, produces and is produced by socio-political logic. The optics of identification exist within an image-culture entrenched in the European colonial imagination: categorically imposed performances of “subjectivity” organize race and gender in service of capital. How can we turn those structures in on themselves and jettison the (non)sense that has enabled territorial, bodily and psychic domination to pervade history and relationships? How does one appear—to the world, to oneself, to one’s beloveds—in ways not foreclosed by the terms and assumptions of preordained imaginaries?
Mole’s time in lower_cavity expands upon her current open-ended project A BEAR SHITS IN THE WOODS. Evoking the structure of a classic joke, it is centered around three characters: Charmin Bear (from the toilet paper ads), Skeletor, arch-nemesis of He-Man, and a cosplay version of a tree. Together, they have absconded to “the woods” where they’re living out a fantasy life as a thrupple. Having escaped the consumer-led performance requirements of their “real world” roles, they can now do whatever they like: roleplay, goof around, make art, do nothing, come together, come undone. Their bond is marked by their fugue state: they have no authentic selves, no discrete subjectivities. They are empty inside. However, with this existential destitution comes a freedom, their emptiness contains infinite possibility. They exist! They relate to each other. They experience tenderness and joy.
