In Gallery: Alex Olson & Andy Campbell on Takako Yamaguchi

Join art and design historian Andy Campbell and artist Alex Olson as they offer their perspectives on the paintings in MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi.

Alex Olson lives and works in Los Angeles. Through the use of color, layering, and texture – both in terms of three-dimensional impasto and implications within visual patterning – Olson controls surface tensions in at once a meticulous and playful manner. Layers appear to peel away to reveal other layers, suggesting several paintings embedded in one, some of which remain forever concealed. Pulling from both historical abstraction and contemporary design, Olson’s paintings often consider the juggling act between the eye and the brain to parse out evidence and desires, sources and analysis, past and present. Viewers can navigate through perception and designation, taking cues within and between works.

Andy Campbell is a historian of art and design whose work broadly privileges archives as wellsprings of engaged communal histories and artistic energies. In his first academic book, Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art, he stressed the fragility and profundity of such community archives; and in edited volumes like Queer Communion: Ron Athey (compiled with Amelia Jones), he positioned participants, witnesses, and co-conspirators as expert voices in reviewing Athey's singular practice. He is the curator of the forthcoming retrospective Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck (originating with Blaffer Art Museum, and opening at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in fall 2026) and editor of the attendant catalogue. Currently, he is working on a text + lecture series considering the pressures of poverty on artistic practice. He is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC's Roski School of Art and Design.