Olga Lamm is a New York City–based artist whose practice centers on perception, identity, and the relationship between inner experience and the world we inhabit. Working across photo-based works, digital collage, language, animation, print, lightboxes, installation, and large-scale projection, her work moves fluidly between formats while remaining grounded in a continuous line of inquiry. Each work forms a self-contained world while remaining connected to a larger, evolving practice shaped by return, shift, and continuity.
Light is central to Lamm’s practice as both material and signal—carrying temperature, rhythm, memory, and time. Across early works, light-based structures, and digitally mediated projections, light is shaped by scale, duration, chromatic contrast, and spatial relationship. Images unfold as environments for encounter, becoming perceptible through attention, movement, and time.
Her work often begins with photographic images created through travel and lived experience, functioning as her own ready-made material. Grounded in personal and collective histories, these images remain open to reconfiguration. Visual elements—landscapes, figures, architectural forms, symbols—move across works, sometimes returning in new contexts, accumulating meaning through recontextualization and dialogue with the world.
Language operates in parallel, appearing as visual structure, mantra, and spatial presence. Through wordplay, symbolic equations, numeric systems, and anagrammatic and phonetic configurations, language becomes material—shaped by rhythm, alignment, and arrangement. Words and symbols generate meaning through relation, sequence, and duration.
Lamm approaches the world as a shared field in which perception emerges through continuous exchange between inner experience and external conditions. She identifies as a metaArtist—a term arising from her early engagement with metaphor and metaphysics—describing a way of working across layers of meaning while maintaining an active dialogue between material and experiential dimensions. This approach underlies her long-standing exploration of impermanence, balance, and transformation over time.
When presented in shared, public, or institutional contexts, conditions shift while the underlying impulse remains constant. The work engages its surroundings, shaped by time, movement, sound, and chance encounter. Each appearance unfolds as a specific situation, contingent on its immediate environment.
Across decades of practice, Lamm’s work is guided by sustained attentiveness and long-term inquiry. Meaning unfolds through continuity, relation, and variation, inviting engagement, study, and new ways of seeing as the work continues to evolve.