Knit Wit
Artist Olek has us in stitches.
By Melissa Seley
Photographed by JEFFREY KILMER
Recently, certain New York neighborhoods look like they've fallen
prey to a drunk, rainbow spider. The prankster behind the mayhem?
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace artist-in-residence
Olek. Her victims? The flotsam that urbanites tend to visually reject:
bikes, cars and sad windows. On nightly forays, Olek crochets street
objects into yarn-covered sculptures. This fall, for her first solo show,
"Knitting Is for Pus****," at Christopher Henry Gallery, she took
things a step further. She stitched up an entire apartment interior.
"Crochet is about movies. I watch about five a day while I work," Olek says. Her stitches, like cinematic frames, are loaded with meaning. In her recent show, a blanket enshrines the scrawled results of her ex-boyfriend's STD test, looped together by twine inspired by the kind her farmer grandparents use to bundle wheat. The same twine winds through Olek's getups -- her clothes are composed of her sculptures' scraps. Crochet has traditionally been a way of dealing with distraction and repetition. For Olek, it's an obsession and a way of being. "When I like something, I do it over and over again," she says. "I'm never going to stop."
"I grew up in a place with no colors," Olek says of Silesia, the
industrial region of Poland where her parents worked in a Socialist
coal mine. At 17, she shaved her head, ditched her bra and crocheted
her first piece -- a white hat. Several years later, after she'd immigrated
to Brooklyn, a bizarre impulse took hold. On Christmas Eve 2003,
Olek was staying at a friend's place upstate and couldn't sleep, so she
crocheted all the food in the fridge. The rest is art history.
"Crochet is about movies. I watch about five a day while I work," Olek says. Her stitches, like cinematic frames, are loaded with meaning. In her recent show, a blanket enshrines the scrawled results of her ex-boyfriend's STD test, looped together by twine inspired by the kind her farmer grandparents use to bundle wheat. The same twine winds through Olek's getups -- her clothes are composed of her sculptures' scraps. Crochet has traditionally been a way of dealing with distraction and repetition. For Olek, it's an obsession and a way of being. "When I like something, I do it over and over again," she says. "I'm never going to stop."
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Posted at 8:03 on Jan 10, 2011
ripping off Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos... hmmm