September 21, 2023 - March 31, 2024
Kemper Room, Paul V. Galvin Library
Illinois Institute of Technology
Trees have played a meaningful role in Jane Olin’s life since childhood. Climate change and human mismanagement now threaten trees across the globe, but new research reveals previously unknown information about their complex social structures and ecological relationships. With renewed curiosity and a sense of urgency, Olin embarked on a wide-ranging exploration of trees.
In the Company of Trees features photographs from that undertaking—the most recent additions to her series, Intimate Conversation. Olin’s expressive approach and her innovative process prints reveal a haunting and singular perspective on trees. Her work conveys both the seeds of hope and the seeds of impending destruction, which only human beings can resolve.
Exhibition guest curated by Helaine Glick and Christina Nafziger
About the artist
My photographs always begin with a question or some curiosity that arises within me. In more than thirty years, I have rarely photographed the external world for its own sake, but for the ways in which it helps to reveal subconscious processes and evoke meaning. I generally focus on a single subject in a related series of images, which allows me to hone in on the heart of what I am after. I also have a contemplative awareness practice that is of central importance to me, and which guides and enhances my working methods and my output.
As an artist who has always liked to experiment, I find that pushing the boundaries of what is possible with both camera and darkroom techniques motivates my best work. I photograph with film and sometimes use a pinhole or Holga camera for making images. I love the darkroom process and take advantage of every tool and technique at my disposal. Playing with exposure, focus, and a wide variety of photographic solutions, I embrace creative accidents, and willingly abandon rules of darkroom procedure, with the intention of expressing a distinctive vision by whatever method seems right. I sometimes print my gelatin silver pieces digitally, but only after darkroom work is completed.
Website: janeolin.com
Instagram: instagram.com/jane_olin/
About Guest Curator, Helaine Glick
Helaine Glick is an independent curator and art writer. She was Assistant Curator at the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, where she worked for over fifteen years. There she curated a wide variety of collection exhibitions plus the major photography exhibitions, In Sharp Focus: The Legacy of Monterey Photography, and Bob Kolbrener In Real Time. She served on the Board of Trustees at Center for Photographic Art in Carmel for six years, and chaired its Programs Committee. As an independent curator she has worked with Center for Photographic Art, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, NUMU Los Gatos, and the Winfield Gallery in Carmel. She has also authored numerous artist brochure and exhibition catalogue essays.
About Curator, Christina Nafziger
Christina Nafziger is a Chicago-based arts writer, editor, and curator interested in lens-based artists, research-based art practices, art and labor, the impact archiving has on memory and identity, and the ways in which location affects identity & art making, particularly in the Midwest. She is currently Co-Managing Editor at Sixty Inches From Center and Associate Editor at Create! Magazine.
“Jane Olin walks regularly among the trees. Since childhood, when the nearby forest was her sanctuary and the trees her earliest companions, she has found deep comfort in their presence. It seems inevitable then, that trees would become a powerful muse for her photographic practice. With deforestation and the climate crisis now threatening their survival, bringing attention to trees felt even more imperative. So her new series – the evocatively titled Intimate Conversation – began to take shape. Her photographs reveal the trees as she sees and experiences them — their stately wildness, their expressive diversity, and especially the atmospheric mystery of this presence. She aims to capture something of their essence and transmit its spirit to the viewer.
While Olin was engaged with her project, groundbreaking information challenging many long-held assumptions about trees has filtered into the public sphere. We have learned that trees are not simply solitary entities competing for limited resources. Instead, it appears they cooperate across species through underground fungal networks that thread the forest floor. Interdependent relationships enable them to transfer nutrients for the mutual benefit of both tree and fungus, and indicate a kind of knowing intelligence not previously understood or even suspected. This revelatory information reaffirmed what Olin has always intuitively felt, and further inspires her work. In this era of climate crisis In the Company of Trees seems more relevant than ever.”
-Text from Jane Olin’s Exhibition Brochure for In the Company of Trees
