Pat Oleszko

Fool for Thought

November 21 - March 3, 2017

Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

Postcard from Pat Oleszko’s exhibit titled “Fool for Thought” featuring a photo of  "Odds at Sea Bahian Odyssey," a 2009 performance and film, Sacatar Foundation, Itaparica, Brazil. Picture shows several people wearing very brightly colored whimsical costumes, with feathers, balloons, larger than life hats, fanciful creatures with large eyeballs, frolicking on the beach. Text: "Pat Oleszko. Fool for Thought."Postcard image: Pat Oleszko, "Odds at Sea Bahian Odyssey," 2009 performance and film, Sacatar Foundation, Itaparica, Brazil

Performance artist Pat Oleszko makes a spectacle of herself — and doesn’t mind if you laugh. With elaborate handmade costumes and props, she utilizes the body as armature for ideas in an array of lampoons that call her audience to action. From the personal to the political, her performances and installations ceremoniously exorcize through humor. Hoisting an enormous burning bra on the exterior of the Women’s Studies Research Center, the exhibition "Fool for Thought" highlights costumes and performances from a wild variety of events including Hello Folly: The Floes & Cons of Arctic Drilling, Oldilocks and the Bewares, Stalking Walking Topiary and The Pat and the Hats. Oleszko, self-identified as the Fool in question and the questioning Fool, fans the flames with rousing absurdity and maintains that she who laughs, lasts.

Pat Oleszko, "Hello Folly: the Floes and cons of Arctic Drilling," 2015. Photo of the performance at Institute of Contemporary. Shows people dressed in fanciful costumes of polar bears seated on iceburgs with a blue ruffled "skirt" representing water.  They carry long pipes with black scarves emanating from the ends (perhaps representing oil?).  Each pipe has the words "Hell no". In the center of the circle is someone dressed in a black suit with yellow boots holding a megaphone. On her head is a large headpiece: a yellow oil rig with demonic cartoon eyes. It is labelled "Polar Wrecks-plorer." Pat Oleszko, "Hello Folly: The Floes and Cons of Arctic Drilling," 2015. Performance view at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Kniznick Gallery Installation: Pat Oleszko, Helen Highwater, 2016. Plastic inner tubes, fabric, plungers, fins, toy cones, dive masks, wig.  This is a sculpture of a woman made of stacked inflatable tires set upon 2 flippers (for feet), orange gloves emerging from the tires on each side for hands, and  a head with a gray plastic wig placed on top. On her head is an upside down bucket, with 3 toilet plungers affixed to the top and both sides.  She is wearing a dive mask which attaches to the toilet plunger.  Yellow construction tape, which says "CAUTION," streams down from the end of the plungers on each side. She is set on a pedestal with blue bunched up plastic resembling water. The words "Helen High Water" are painted in orange on the tires.Kniznick Gallery Installation: Pat Oleszko, Helen Highwater, 2016. Plastic inner tubes, fabric, plungers, fins, toy cones, dive masks, wig

Kniznick Gallery Installation: Pat Oleszko, "Betty Boob," 2007. Balloons, fabric. This sculpture is a woman facing the corner of the room with her hands outstretched above her head, touching the walls.  She is wearing a red floor-length dress and has matching red fabric wrapped around her head with a blow.  The main feature of her attire is a cape made of a cluster of pink balloons, flowing down her back and onto the floor, resembling breasts with red nipples. Her arms have the red “nipples as well, in a row the length of her arms. On her head she wears one of the pink balloons as a hat.Kniznick Gallery Installation: Pat Oleszko, "Betty Boob," 2007. Balloons, fabric.

Selected Press

State of the Arts Magazine

January 24, 2017

The Justice

Events

Exercises for the Quiet Eye with Annie Storr

December 8, 2016

WSRC Scholar, art historian and museum educator, Annie Storr will lead art experiencing exercises through the Kniznick Gallery exhibition "Pat Oleszko | Fool for Thought." Storr developed Exercises for the Quiet Eye (EQE) to encourage patient reflection, appreciation, and an attempt to avoid the rush to understand or determine a set interpretation for what we see.

Artist Lecture | Pat Oleszko

January 25, 2017

Artist Reception | Pat Oleszko

January 25, 2017

Climates of learning: local environmental knowledge and international communication in young people’s education

February 2, 2017

Guest speaker Barbara Bodenhorn will discuss two international youth exchanges (conducted in ecologically vulnerable regions of Alaska, England, Mexico and Mongolia) designed to broaden young people’s existing environmental knowledge, foster a deeper awareness of their global connections, promote future thinking and encourage a sense of engagement in that future. A discussion with some Brandeis student respondents will follow, addressing how we might effectively combine art and science to engage young people’s energies in their own futures.