PORT ANGELES — Beginning Monday, artist David Teng Olsen and student assistants will create a mural in the Peninsula College PUB Gallery of Art.
The mural, expected to be finished by May 14, will be titled “Rain Shadow.”
Olsen said he envisions the mural at Peninsula College as a large stream-of-consciousness drawing with direct references to the history of the college and the region.
He will accept suggestions from students, faculty and staff during his installation, which he describes as both production and performance.
Olsen said he hopes to focus on his relationship to the region, having been born in nearby Seattle and having spent a large portion of his life living in the Pacific Northwest.
The mural will be displayed at 12:35 p.m. Thursday outside the Little Theater, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd., when Olsen will present a talk, “Identity and Influences of the Northwest,” during the latest edition of Studium Generale.
The event is free and open to the public.
A Wellesley College artist and professor, Olsen said he is “known for my fabulously detailed, cartoony works that insert figures into bustling abstractions,” and that he is inspired by “childhood tragedies, race, class, religion and science.”
In art, “I use personal narratives as the foundation for the work I create because they tend to deal with universal themes that the audience can easily understand and connect to,” Olsen continued.
Olsen added it is important to him that the viewer finds something familiar and exciting about his work.
Mike Maizels, new media curator at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum, said Olsen’s “quixotic, highly poetic work seeks to probe the origins of our sense of identity” and that “while he is concerned with this question in the abstract, his own art is curiously, restlessly and insistently autobiographical.”
Olsen, Maizels continued, uses himself as “test subject” and “draws on his unusual but nevertheless quintessentially American life story to examine how and why we construct our own peculiar self-understandings.”
Olsen has taught digital media at Wellesley since 2006, has created site-specific installations across the country and has collaborated on numerous animation projects.
For more information, call 360-417-6476.
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Reporter Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 56650, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
