Eric Oglander makes his sculptures—poetic and odd, searching and guided by a sense of play—in the back of an eccentric antique shop. Hidden behind a wall in Tihngs, a store he stocks with one-of-a-kind finds, and operates on Sunday afternoons in Ridgewood, Queens, is a workshop filled with scraps of wood, piles of button-down shirts, and other cast-off materials that Oglander crafts into curious contraptions, often at minuscule scale. Some are elaborate and mechanical, like the homespun catapults and trebuchets he builds and coats in white paint; others are crafted from the simplest of gestures, like tiny wooden totems bearing curves and curlicues whittled with just a knife and a thumb. All of them could blend in on shelves full of offbeat objects.
“I was always into stuff,” Oglander said of his upbringing in rural Tennessee, where he obsessively collected things like arrowheads, fossils, and rocks as well as fish and other organisms. “I had 14 snakes at one point,” he said, expressing a persistent interest in pythons. Both of his parents and his brother were artists—as a family, they once mounted an art show in the Nashville airport—but Oglander is mostly self-taught, having dropped out of high school when he was a junior to follow his own idiosyncratic path.
After he moved to New York at age 26, Oglander made a name for himself with “Craigslist Mirrors,” searching online listings of mirrors for sale and posting pictures of their reflections on Tumblr and Instagram. In 2016 he published his collection as a photo book with TBW Books. “That was a lesson for me: that I should pay attention to compulsions I have outside of art,” he said. “That’s where the best art comes from—these weird little obsessions.”
Eric Oglander: Crab lamp, 2024.
Photo Annik Wetter/Courtesy Bernheim Gallery, London
One of his obsessions is creatures—as seen in Crab lamp (2024), a sculptural lamp he made using a crustacean shell he found on a Florida beach, set on top of a blue-and-white-striped Oxford shirt stretched over a wooden frame. A button doubles as the on-off switch. “I don’t often buy art supplies,” he said, noting that he started using shirts—a frequent motif—after finding one in an abandoned house, then saturating it in beeswax. “I like recontextualizing everyday things—stuff that’s readily available and that might be overlooked.” He approaches all that stuff with a careful kind of craftsmanship: Butterfly tongue (2024), a small slab of wood standing upright on a pedestal, features a corner slice curled over by a simple stroke of a knife.
Both those works featured in “Do Nothing Machine,” a solo show this past spring at Bernheim Gallery in London. Prior to that was “World Beyond World,” a group exhibition at New York’s 1969 Gallery in which Oglander showed a series of glass jars filled with water, plants, and living organisms one might find in an aquarium: snails, scuds, daphnia, ostracods. In text that accompanied the exhibition, he offered instructions too: “I encourage all purchasers to engage with their jar(s), and to treat this engagement as an engagement with the self,” Oglander wrote. “Welcome failure. Mimic nature. Have fun.”
