sculpture.gruntarchives.org

Daniel Olson - Collection
January 1996

Daniel Olson wasn't your typical kid: he never found satisfaction in collecting your usual assortment of boys knickknacks. Stamps and baseball cards never did it for him – but years later, the seemingly unwanted things did. He began noticing “bits of debris from the side of the road”: always stumbling upon these abandoned wonders, Olson created a leather, collecting tool, filled it with a metal pipe, and stenciled “COLLECTION” on it. According to Olson, “the street becomes a studio [and] the junk of urban life the artist’s materials.”

“Mainly, what I am doing is making a source of perplexity into an activity that passes the time pleasurably”.

Paraphrased from and quoted from Daniel Olson’s “Collection” Artist Statement