Cover of Lettre International [Issue 128] featuring Olive Ayhens, Camelid in the City (2019).
Lettre International
Issue 128 | April 2020
OLIVE AYHENS
Painters and drawers create poetic-political dream landscapes - sophisticated, ecological, insightful. The world is out of joint in these hallucinatory scenes. An ur-camel beholds the big-city orgy of electrical energy at the shore of standing water. Almost extinct aboriginal inhabitants of the prairie graze in the glare of an empty metropolis. Melting glaciers pour out of mountains and forests in a neverland. Laboratories of digital parallel worlds collide in a confusing chaos of cable. Seas surge against the ramparts of cities. Forces of nature and machines, tradition and disruption, geological time and constructs of modernity collide on and in one another, embedded in a last convulsive ecstasy. Postapocalyptical fantasies. Everything is dislocated. In these worlds, there scarcely remains an alternative. Apocalyptic portraits of the end of anthropocentric civilization, ecologically overwhelmed. The creators eyeball the disappearance, the overlying causes of the collapse of their habitat with humor and wisdom, as an unpreventable disaster and represent themselves as luxurious tough guys. Playful or serious? Parody or exaggeration? Anticipation or commendation? With such a freakshow it is all thinkable. Circus rings!