The New York-based interdisciplinary artist examines the uncanny of the everyday in this unsettling mediation on the home
A sparking plug, a mouldy fridge, a breathing oven: what happens when our household objects have a mind of their own? That’s the question at the core of Olivia Erlanger’s Appliance (2024), which follows a young woman haunted by her possessions in her new home, in line with the artist’s long-running interest in object-oriented ontology (a speculative philosophy which rejects the centrality of human experience). Erlanger embeds classic horror movie tropes – aerial shots à la Paranormal Activity, glissando-heavy violin score – into mundane and familiar scenes, querying our reliance on appliances in their various forms. Throughout the film, we witness a series of bizarre incidents, from a fridge full of mouldy groceries, to a mysterious plug-shaped facial burn and the arrival of a school-aged child and an adult who performs a makeshift séance on the kitchen table. All the while, the protagonist jabs her bruised stomach with a syringe before bed every night. It’s a chilling watch, not least because the increasingly extreme goings-on are all comfortingly wrapped up in the identikit aesthetics of suburbia.
None of which is to say that it doesn’t have moments of humour, too – albeit in a sick, The Substance (2024) sort of way. One night, the protagonist (played by Callie Hernandez) rises from bed with that all too familiar anxiety and dutifully walks downstairs to check if she’d left the oven on. She bends down to look inside, oven light on, and cranes her entire neck in, as though forced by something beyond her control. Surely, the fleshy sides of her cheek will be scorched by the piping hot metal. It’s a relief when she pulls herself out burn-free, but the fear has already taken hold – and Erlanger will not let up. Yet Appliance’s thematics are wide-ranging: loneliness, addiction and mania; the never-ending curse of domestic labour; our psychological entanglement with our appliances, from our phones to fridges, to the extent that they become an extension of self; the false ideal of home as sanctuary. By the end, it’s impossible to tell if the haunting has ended, or if it has only just begun.
Screening dates:
Art Lovers Movie Club: Olivia Erlanger, Appliance, 2024
22 September–22 October, 2025
© Courtesy the artist
Olivia Erlanger (b. 1990, New York) works across sculpture, film, writing and performance to examine American dreams and delusions. Mining the myth of suburbia affords the artist a focus on the semiotics of the periphery, analyzing its architecture, infrastructures and ecosystems. Erlanger was awarded the 2024 Fondazione Henraux International Sculpture Prize and was recently nominated a finalist for the CIRCA Prize (2025). Selected recent exhibitions include Spinoff at Luhring Augustine, New York (2025); If Today Were Tomorrow at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas (2024); Humour in the Water Coolant at ICA London, UK (2024, performance); Nonmemory at Hauser Wirth, Los Angeles (2023), Dream Journal at Company Gallery, New York (2023); and On Failure at Soft Opening, London (2023). Erlanger is the author of Appliance (Wild Seeds, 2022) and the co-author of Garage (MIT Press, 2018) with architect Luis Ortega Govela. Her writing has appeared in publications including Tank Magazine, PIN UP, Flash Art, and Harvard Design Magazine. The artist lives and works in New York.
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