Nina Johnson is proud to present The abbreviation of eternity, a solo exhibition of new embroidered quilts and textile works by Louisville-based artist Elsa Hansen Oldham. Known for her deft fusion of traditional handicraft that incorporates characters based off archetypes, pop culture icons, and imagined personas, Hansen Oldham expands her practice here with a deeply physical and rhythmic series of quilts—works that act as both narrative tapestries and meditative sites of making.

Hansen Oldham began her artistic journey in ballet and modern dance and has recently returned to incorporating dance into her life; these works reflect that shift. Drawing on myth, memory, and pop cultural references, The abbreviation of eternity weaves a world of stitched characters—some historic, some fictional, some close to home.

These figures form an associative cosmos where beauty, tragedy, and absurdity live side by side. This selection of works focuses primarily on hand-embroidered quilts, supplemented by smaller framed embroidery pieces. The result is a show grounded in the tactile and temporal—the breath in each stitch, the body in each composition.

In The red shoes, a keystone work in the exhibition, two dancers—Fred Herko, a figure from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, and the fictional ballerina Victoria Page—are depicted mid-leap. Both are rendered at the moment of their fatal fall: a perfect jeté off a West Village brownstone and a cinematic plunge from a Monégasque balcony. The juxtaposition of poise and despair captures the strange elegance of self-destruction, filtered through the lens of performance and compulsion.

Other quilts explore themes of ritual, escape, and female embodiment. Waves, inspired in part by Hokusai’s 1831 woodblock print, Great wave off Kanagawa, places women in communion with the sea, challenging the persistent and tiresome trope of “man’s dominion over nature.” In Stunts, which has been years in the making, Hansen Oldham mines her family’s experience performing with a local circus, creating a kinetic, jubilant tribute to spectacle and interdependence. Clouds of unknowing, more subdued in tone, invites quiet reflection—a stitched meditation on the paradox of living with both awareness and uncertainty.

The exhibition operates in dual registers: “Each run of stitches adds a breath and body to the quilt,” the artist notes—a description that mirrors the labor-intensive, embodied nature of quilting itself. There is repetition but never monotony. The process becomes a kind of devotional act, each gesture accumulating meaning and presence.

Elsa Hansen Oldham: The abbreviation of eternity is on view in the Upstairs Gallery through November 15th, 2025.