Olga Lamm is a New York City–based artist whose practice unfolds through a sustained inquiry into perception, identity, and lived experience. Her work moves fluidly across photography, digital environments, language, animation, light-based works, installation, print, and large-scale public projection, while remaining anchored in a continuous line of exploration shaped over decades through attention and return.
Images in Lamm’s practice operate as lived configurations. Each work opens as a field through rhythm, passage, and perceptual attunement, coming into focus through encounter. Light moves through the work, both carrier and condition—architectural and atmospheric—registering scale, proximity, and time as experience gathers.
Renaissance Ball (2000–2001) sets the cadence. Identity appears as performance, movement becomes knowledge, and image takes shape as choreography. Journey (2001–2003) turns that motion inward—drag, masquerade, and transformation unfolding across imagined landscapes where the self is rehearsed and reconfigured.
The work takes place within digital space, where the computer functions simultaneously as tool, laboratory, and studio—a field in which images evolve through sustained engagement. i (2002–2003) emerges within this environment as a coded self, first realized through numeric inscription on synthetic fabric.
In i (v1), numbers form the body itself—consciousness articulated through code. The work advances into i (v2) as an animated sequence of eighteen numeric figures, where image and voice move as a single system through a synthetic digital choir. Objects, animals, vehicles, and figures flicker and dissolve, culminating in a butterfly. The cycle loops continuously. The number eighteen—associated with chai, the Hebrew word for life—threads through the work as an organizing pulse, bringing number, sound, and image into structural correspondence. The i series becomes a foundational code within Lamm’s system: a single principle extending into multiplicity.
In 2006, light enters the work as an internal register. Untitled/monuMENTALism (Light Box #1) introduces illumination from within, where presence is felt as a lived state. Created alongside Visual Awareness, the work extends Lamm’s inquiry into perception as embodied orientation. In Visual Awareness, waveform appears as a visual condition through which landscape, reflection, and field come into relation. Perception takes material form—carrying tempo and attention—where inner position and external conditions remain in active exchange.
This inquiry expands into metaFace (2008–2009), where mirrored landscapes assemble into face-like structures. Terrain reads as a portrait, and identity takes shape through reflection. The work reveals that perception carries its own image—that the world responds in kind to inner alignment.
From 2009 to 2013, Lamm develops metaFour: metaSingularity (2009–2012), followed by metaCamouflage, metaDynamic, and metaEnergy (2013). Across these works, figures, fields, and light reorganize through shifting conditions. Presence appears as adaptive and relational, shaped through continuous exchange between body, technology, and environment.
During this period, language enters the work through the ongoing Wordplay series and related monolithic works such as BELIEF = BE LIFE, IMPULSE / I M PULSE, and LIFE/FILE (2013). Letters come into alignment through spacing and internal correspondence, with rhythm emerging as a generative principle. In LIFE/FILE, archival logic assumes form as a living cycle, where life and record circulate in a continuous process.
Movement through space informs Lamm’s system in metaMorphosis on the Road (2015–2016), where travel and landscape become perceptual pathways. Images move through time, holding layered resonance as meaning gathers. Elements progress in sequence, registering through passage and reflection. Works such as Sunset by Proxy (2015) and neuroPath (2017–2019) extend this inquiry, tracing how cognition, environment, and experience shape one another over time.
Between 2017 and 2023, Lamm develops Architecture of metaFlight, arising from the sensation of flight in dreams. Across seventeen works, arcs and spirals expand outward, organizing the compositions through rhythm and release. Architecture functions as a metaphor for consciousness itself, holding and redirecting energy in motion.
In 2023, the work enters open air. Images shaped within digital space appear as light across buildings, trees, and the atmosphere between them in Harlem, NYC. The city becomes a collaborator. Weather, movement, and chance inflect each appearance, allowing the work to unfold through shared presence in real time.
WallEye—Lamm’s projector and conceptual framework—articulates this relationship. “Wall” refers to surface; “eye” to awareness. Together, they describe a condition in which light, space, and attention move in relation. Projection is grounded in proximity and duration: images meeting the world where they are, inflected by timing, context, and the conditions of place.
Recent works such as $HEART (she_art) (2023) and 1+1=1 (2024) gather long-standing inquiries into symbolic form. $HEART (she_art) places value in circulation, where heart, currency, and current converge. 1+1=1 renders unity as a fundamental condition—an equation of mirror and shared field. These works stand within the larger system as points of orientation, where meaning emerges through recognition, return, and lived experience.
In 2025, metaVessel: A Tetrad of Chambers forms as a circulatory body. Bridges, towers, reflections, and sky gather into a continuous field of flow. Across four chambers, it breathes as one.
That same year, metaWave (2025) extends the work as transmission. A waveform travels through space and surface, moving with time, air, and wind—carrying the work forward, open to resonance.
Lamm’s practice operates at the intersection of metaphor and metaphysics, where perception, language, and form organize through relation—inner states taking shape in the world through image, light, spatial logic, and exchange.
This orientation includes an ongoing dialogue with her late father, the artist Leonid Lamm—rooted in shared attention to structure, language, and transformation—carried through her evolving inquiry. Across decades, Olga Lamm’s practice gathers as a connected field—one work opening into the next, grounded in motion.