Peter Olson’s Year of the Plague is a ceramic series from the hybrid photographer-ceramicist, taking on the shock of 2020 and its reverberations. For the artist most known for his street photography, portraits are obviously and most noticeably absent-replaced by voids and shadows. Each ceramic form with imagery pairs with a shadow piece; the pairs create a series of garnitures forming architectural statement. Now is a time of reflecting on such upheaval and loss.

“There’s nothing on them that hasn’t gone through my camera” is his axiom.

Olson is a trained professional photographer, who over the past six years has explored new frontiers in the medium with his entrée to ceramics. He is inspired by museum collections and throngs of hurried pedestrians in NYC and other large metropoles. The repetition and rhyming of ritual, both daily and religious, act as a baseline for the bands of imagery that play like sheet music around his ceramic garnitures. The kaleidoscopic photo-collages wrap around the pieces completely, including the interiors, creating moments of surprise, and hint at narratives as the past and present melt into one another.