NFT art pioneer Olive Allen has opened her first-ever solo show in New York at Postmasters Gallery. Titled “Welcome to the Metaverse” and occupying all 4500 square feet of the gallery space, the exhibition spans sculpture, installation, video and NFT artworks.
Welcome to the Metaverse deconstructs the emergence of how immersive experiences are reshaping 21st-century life. Olive Allen has created several new large-scale projects that transform the gallery into an experiential playground, works that question how digital experience can be translated into the real world, radically altering how we see and interact with art, and ultimately connect with cultural communities both on and offline.
Olive Allen is an artist with a greatly unconventional journey reflected in the theme and overall approach to the exhibition; she is moving away from a traditional white cube environment to create a video game-like journey for the viewer to become a part of the Metaverse. The exhibition reveals Allen’s deep fascination with society and technology and the future of this interaction. One of the less obvious underlying themes is the search for one’s own identity in the world that is so used to assigning labels and is quick to exclude those who don’t fit in the pre-assigned box.
Postmasters has been transformed into a veritable Metaverse kiosk, with products and brands tongue-and-cheekily critiquing the ways in which Web3 is being commodified. By looking at how the cyber-utopian ethos of Web3 and the Metaverse is merely a promise at this stage and still remains largely unrealized, Allen’s show attempts to develop a critical platform in which to analyze the emergence of new technologies. What the media of today may say about the cultures of tomorrow, the exhibition at Postmasters ultimately begs the question: Metaverse, but for whom?
OLIVE ALLEN Welcome to the Metaverse at Postmasters Gallery New York – May 28th
About the artist
Olive Allen is a New York-based visual artist. She is a pioneer of the crypto art movement and has been creating in the NFTs space since its inception in 2018. Her art, sardonic in nature, explores current cultural shifts through deeply personal experience.
Olive Allen draws on her background in both fine arts and technology to create new media art that captures the internet culture of the new age and exposes systems of value. She is a cryptocurrency early adopter and one of the pioneers of the NFT space. She uses token-based digital works to create social
commentary. Her approach gamifies digital art objects to engender performative, interactive relationships with her audience. She has exhibited with König Galerie (Berlin), Postmasters (New York), Nagel Draxler Gallery (Cologne), and Save Art Space (London), among others. Her work has been written about in publications such as The New York Times, FAD Magazine, The Art Gorgeous Magazine, and CoinDesk.
