Your Words Are Only Guesses

Andi & Lance Olsen

In this video, words appear, fade away, and reform through a series of reverse erasures and erasures to reveal multiple, ostensibly unrelated texts, underscoring language as a series of ever-shifting approximations. At the same time, the visuals — a toxic desert-scape turned on its side and mirrored — suggests various human erasures upon our world.

At heart, then, Your Words Are Only Guesses is about the complex act of reading, about trying to un-conceal that which our culture has made invisible, about the consequences of reading one way rather than another.

Andi Olsen’s work has been exhibited across the U.S. and Europe. Olsen received her B.A. & M.A. in Art History from the University of Virginia. She taught art history as a part-time lecturer at the Universities of Idaho & Kentucky and Kentucky State University. Lance Olsen is the author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction. Recipient of Guggenheim, Berlin Prize, DAAD Artist-in-Berlin, and N.E.A. fellowships, as well as a Fulbright Scholar, he teaches narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah.