almost something insider forum

Diagram to show an inappropriate stance while waiting for a bus

I am in the process of writing letters to places, such as my local pub, grocery store and favourite local gigging band. I write to these people who do not know me from the next punter and apologise for my absence on a certain day in their bar, store or at their gig. My excuses are always a bit lame and go into much to much detail. Whilst writing to my local pub I apologized that I would not be able to make it as normal on the Friday night and wanted to tell them in plenty of time so that they would not miss the usual £25 pounds that I spend. I have had a wonderful reply from them which has started a dialogue with them completely by chance, neither of us knowing which is the madder.

Untitled

Olivia-jane Ransley makes work concerned with process and the everyday. By isolating actions and situations she invites us to really consider them, find the mysterious in the ordinary. She is interested in the performative aspect of our lives, the things we do when we feel we are being watched and are overly conscious of ourselves. Olivia-jane's practise includes drawings, video, photography and slides. Her work examines the humour of how we react in particular situations and what is socially appropriate or inappropriate. It uses the mode of the DIY or etiquette manual. Her films are about endurance, in their subject and in the experience for the viewer. They depict an action which is known and commonplace, as we watch the action begins to change and becomes something different. Olivia-jane Ransley lives and works in London. She is a graduate of Central St. Martins School of Art, and is a founding member of the Second Rate Art group, a collective involved in organising exhibitions and supporting emerging artists.

Almost Something wants you to visit these places – this terrain of near hits and misses that all of these works provoke. What is it to reckon with a piece of art that doesn’t assert what it aims to say in either physical or visual terms? What realm do your mind and your eye run off to in order to rekindle the spark of meaning? Is it really plausible that looking deeper will ease the strain on our collective psychic powers? Alas, as long as looking, seeing, and thinking remain as our available tools for understanding so will imagining, abstracting, and inventing be our means of providing a quality of newness to the world around us.

The warp and woof of everyday communication is like a rich quarry for the strange and intriguing when one pokes at it a bit. It's like when you say the same word over and over again and it suddenly sounds crazy. In her youth, Olivia wrote a short book on Aristotle's Categories. Working on the text so closely convinced her of a thesis Aristotle would have argued against. Human language doesn't reveal anything more basic at all. It just gets more complicated. But, she argues, this is no reason to despair of meaning. The trouble is that there is so much meaning, not that it is fragile.

Diagram to show an inappropriate stance while waiting for a bus

not greeting

greeting

untitled video, 2004