If X, then Y

Solo Exhibition

Gibb Street Gallery, Visarts, Rockville, MD

From the Press Release


Painting is Janet Olney’s vehicle for probing the convention of truth. Through observation, she finds truth to be complex, driven by diverse perspectives, assumptions, and experiences. In her experience, reality is a multi-faceted, conditional notion. Her work explores the changeable nature of contemporary reality.


In this body of work, Janet Olney applies conditional statements and logic to perceptual events. The paintings propose if-then statements and offer a conclusion that is open to inference. This series is based on two-value truth tables that Olney constructs using shapes. By building logical statements of visual forms, her tables show how the truth or falsity of a visual expression ultimately depends on the truth or falsity of its components. If the premise of abstract forms is true, then the painting must also be considered true. Each painting considers the visual values and draws a conclusion about the realm in which they exist.