Ida 2018

“Ida” is compromised of three mermaid tails installed in the LaundryZone in Los Angeles’ Mid City neighborhood. Mermaids are a kind of pre-gender or genderless archetype, a representation of a chimeric existence that Olivia Erlanger feels we each take on as different environmental pressures affect transformations. When they are presented as female, mermaids bring up many questions of mobility, not only in a physical sense, but also ones around agency. Ariel from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (1837), for example, gave up her voice to walk on land. This kind of psychological voice loss mirrors Freud’s patient Ida Bauer, whose diagnosis was one of the first recorded cases of female hysteria. Hysteria is itself a fiction, and yet the trope of hysterical woman persists. The project has been installed at the Daelim Museum and the Kistefos Museum, and is part of the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.