Humor has it

Lisa Beck, Anna Berlin, Paola de la Calle, Wells Chandler, Alyssa Eble, Dana Frankfort, Claire Huber, Simone Kearney, Fiza Khatri, Michelle Laxalt, Keisha Prioleau-Martin, Eilen Itzel Mena, Emilie Stark-Menneg, Jiha Moon, $lim, Chang Sujung

February 12 - March 26, 2022

Olympia is proud to present Humor Has It, a serendipitous 16-person group exhibition devoted to mouthfuls of humor within the context of painting, works on paper, and sculpture. By exercising humor as a visual and verbal tool, this group of artists add, remix, and rearrange pre-existing thoughts, offering a reprogramming of systems, and of personal and social experiences.

Here are some thoughts…

Mapping the guts of something in order to revel within boundaries or to cross lines.  

Explode the boundaries of ‘what can be’ 

Slapstick and art-making share qualities of existing between knowing and not knowing; balancing oneself within these liminalities, while developing a distinctive self-based language. 

Sometimes words aren’t necessary. Sometimes they are. The choice is yours. 

Empathy is developed through understanding social interrelations — like standup, you must accept one’s position as the artist, the maker, but from there you can choose whether or not to accept what’s created. 

Humor can be a way of seeing things in a new way,  a way to learn or empathize, helping the tough stuff go down so much easier. It makes everything feel reachable ...all of us, capable of mistakes.

Viewers have agency, but are also subject to the performance.  

Formal dualities defy any categorization. 

Laughter is deeply ingrained in my social being– a tool for improvisation. I have often leaned on it as a tool to navigate social circumstances that weather my nonbinary, deeply queer body. Words often come out of my mouth before thinking – the process has become both reactive and spontaneous, breaking tensions. 

There is even sometimes a hilarity of pain. 

Humor has it all…