Janet Olney’s bold, new paintings reframe the familiar and allude to experiences that lie just outside of our awareness. In this peripheral world, the mysterious intertwines with the known through spatial relationships, the play of light, and the connection of gesture to form. Spatial puzzles beckon to be deciphered while challenging our perception of the world. Olney invites the viewer to entertain the inexplicable and explore the facets of humanity through abstraction.

Parallax
Mixed Media Installation,
MICA Curated Faculty Exhibition, it can begin with clouds, 2019
Curated by John Ros

ICA Baltimore, Solo Exhibition, 2019
Absence/Presence is a new body of work that explores absence as a presence and a sensation connected to spatial memory. Through a series of drawings, paintings, and digitally fabricated objects, Janet Olney asks viewers to navigate the ambiguity of the seen and unseen while grappling with the fleeting nature of perception. Using a language of abstraction and gesture, Olney remixes the various components to reflect on existence and the passage of time.

The Persistence of Shape,
Lightwell Gallery, University of Oklahoma

A growing number of physicists believe that reality is energy and exists only because human consciousness wills it to exist. When coping with this different definition of existence, we are confronted with the unreliably of perception. Our understanding of the surrounding world is skewed by our personal experience. The Persistence of Shape explores a realm of uncertainty that lies just outside our awareness and presents an alternative narrative to that of everyday life.
 
Through paintings and objects, this work presents unfamiliar spatial relationships and inspires moments of recognition that what we see may not be true. Using a personal language of shape and color, I reframe the familiar and reveal a world populated with things that defy naming. Within my invented spaces, shapes persist. Gesture becomes form, and forms are both planar and dimensional, blurring the lines between illusion, flatness, and object.
 
When we question what we believe to be true, assumptions are stripped away. There is the opportunity to understand the world through a new lens -- the experiences of others different from ourselves.

In this body of work, the forms from my painted world enter the physical realm. Painting becomes an expanded field where I explore the relationship between flat and non-flat, object and illusion and the subjectivity of perception.

This work explores the fuzzy reality at play in the outlying regions of the periphery. Things in the fringes of our field of vision are flickers of shape and movement. These fleeting glimpses and shadows are incorporated into the narrative of our surroundings. This peripheral information taps into both interpretation and imagination -- what we experience and what we believe we see. 

This series references painting structures from art history flattened into contemporary space. The imagery is distilled from the daily barrage of visual material, popular iconography, art history, and plays on language. Initial ideas are transformed through sketches and digital media. Artifacts, both historical and digital, build a visual vocabulary of forms that travel into the uncertainty of perception in search of truth.

The paintings in this project explore gesture as a mark and as time embedded in the surface. Through masking, layers are obscured and later revealed to form a non-linear progression. The physical intertwining of past and present creates an emotional and contemplative space.