Wrapped in Wool, the City Argues Back

Olek covers things. Taxis, bicycles, entire building facades, human bodies in motion—anything that holds still long enough gets wrapped in dense, patterned crochet, color going in every direction at once. The Polish-born, New York-based artist has been doing this long enough that the initial shock of the images wears off and something more interesting takes over: the question of what, exactly, she’s saying about the surfaces she occupies.

Her answer—and it’s not a bad one—is that cities are built on fixed grids laid down centuries ago, but the bodies moving through those grids are still evolving, still refusing to stay still. The infrastructure is petrified. The people aren’t. Wrapping a cab in yarn isn’t vandalism so much as a temporary correction, a reminder that the city is supposed to serve the living rather than the other way around.

Mario Lombardo, the Argentine-born graphic designer behind magazines like SPEX and Dummy, makes a related argument from inside the print world—that visual language has to keep mutating even when the institutions around it calcify. He and Olek are doing different things, but they’re circling the same problem. Space gets allocated. Someone decides how it looks. Then someone else shows up with yarn, or a redesigned masthead, and makes it argue back.

What I like about Olek’s work specifically is the humor in it—the absurd scale of the undertaking against the domestic softness of the material. Crochet is grandmothers and living rooms and patience. A crocheted wall in a city block is something else entirely. The contrast does most of the work without needing an artist’s statement to explain it.