b. St. Louis, Missouri
Oleon is interested in presenting realistically rendered environments that simultaneously encourage and undermine expectations of what we perceive as real. She warps perspective and shifts perceptions by utilizing overlays of digitally altered renditions of the same scene. Through the use of dramatic lighting she seeks to illuminate sections of the space while simultaneously confusing the viewer’s apprehension of the relationships within the space. As a result of her successive reprocessing and layering of the original setting, the paintings present what appears to be a factual image but which is in reality a confounding fiction.
Oleon works from digital photos taken in public spaces (lobbies, etc), places that are contrived to look habitable but void of human presence. The images go through an extensive digital process of layering, inverting, mirroring, and the changing of density and color that creates a composite image that is then translated and painted onto canvas or panel. The painting is a faithful rendition of the final worked image, painted in a traditional manner in oil, but clearly derived from a camera.
Her newest series is based on a series of photographs of apartment lobbies taken in a section of Los Angeles where she grew up, buildings constructed in the 1970s that have benign, kitschy, and sometimes quite ornate lobbies. These are entrances, places to pass through on your way to somewhere else, places to rest, places to wait, places to meet, to collect mail, a no-where land.
The lobbies are photographed from the outside glass doors and utilize reflections from out on the street to superimpose over the interiors, leaving one with a sense of dislocation and a sense of ambiguity about what is real and what is not. The images are an amalgam of incidents, a real place dislocated in time and space, realistically rendered but on the verge of abstraction. There is a disquiet in the midst of the mundaneness, a place rife with many associations, a waiting area, a staging area, a netherland.
