Discomfiture of Presence:
A Multiple Piece by Olga Alexander

Discomfiture of Presence consists, to date, of over fifty five found photographs that have been rephotographed, manipulated and otherwise recontextualized by Olga Alexander. According to the art critic Terrie Sultan, the piece is complex and “invites us to mine our own history in order to interpret the artists’ imagistic intention.”

The artifice of the picture surface is reinforced in this work by the text and invites our interpretation. The seemingly ideal images of relationships that are depicted speak of the presence of love, while the text added by the artist and which is from a child’s point of view, reveals the absence of love. The photographsare arranged in arbitrary and non-linear manner and hung from bows as though they were mementos. However, these mementos do not exist in the past but in the internal present. Susan Sontag has referred to old photographs as getting better with time. Olga Alexander stops this process and forces us to look outside of the frame.