Volume Gallery is pleased to announce What we knew before knowing, a meditation on memory by OOIEE after RO/LU w/ Matt Olson, an exhibition of design to be experienced not as a fixed object but as a transitory state, opening November 7, 2025, from 5 to 8 p.m.

There are moments when perception softens and we can sense an object is more than itself. What we knew before knowing is an invitation to perceive in the direction of post-judgement. Here, design can behave more like memory itself: unstable, flickering, and alive in transition. Something is developing. Matt Olson has an “open practice” in which making is thinking, where objects are not invented but found through a sort of inverted dialogue, recognizing, extracting, and recontextualizing—linking and joining concepts, problems, theories, and forms that remain unassuming yet unmistakably charged.

Rather than proposing definitive forms, the exhibition assembles an atmosphere of objects in flux. Materials typically associated with utility—stacked cribbing blocks, parking stops, lighting, Plexiglas, and aluminum—behave as memory conductors. Found photographs appear decontextualized, while seating hovers between invitation and apparition. The exhibition seeks relational attention. Each form leans toward the next, resonating with and accompanying one another, which together create a “WE”.

Certain motifs emerge from memory, quotations from experience not to be interpreted, but to be felt. A reproduction of a found, signed photograph of Laura Dern from the 1985 film Mask is a gesture of true perception. In the film, her blind character falls in love with a boy who is suffering from a disfiguring genetic condition—not by overlooking his difference, but by perceiving him more clearly than those with sight.

More simulacra, a print of a PDF of the books Bunker Archaeology by Paul Virilio and The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger by Luce Irigaray appears—not to be read, but as a living material and conceptual presence. Virilio’s study of wartime bunkers becomes a lens for thinking about how design, function, and strategy differ from experience. These texts resonate with the exhibition’s attention to objects as carriers of memory and thought, existing between use and perception, presence and imagination. After Scott Burton Chair w/ Eric Timothy Carlson and RO/LU is almost 15 years old and has never been shown publicly.

Fleabane (Erigeron annuus), a wildflower often dismissed as a weed, helped shape the ideas here. Though cast aside in most landscapes, it holds medicinal value in its stems, revealing usefulness where none was assumed. Like fleabane, the materials in the exhibition—stacked lumber, found images, provisional structures—are invited not to prove themselves, but to be encountered anew.

These objects are in a state of becoming—layered and alive. A network rather than a statement, a fog of associations thick enough to move through, but never fully grasp. What emerges is not a collection of things, but a rehearsal of perception itself.

This will be the artist’s third exhibition with Volume Gallery, having previously exhibited with various collaborators and under different names. What we knew before knowing will be on view through December 20, 2025

OOIEE (Office Of Interior Establishing Exterior) was founded in 2016 by Matt Olson to work on a wide array of projects involving contemporary art and design ranging from furniture, gardens and sculpture and extending to teaching, writing and research. It is a cross-disciplinary, open practice. Previous to founding OOIEE and OOIEE Landscape Office, he was co-founder of RO/LU from 2002-2015 during which time he oversaw work ranging from residential landscape design to residencies in museums. His work has been shown internationally and is in the permanent collection at the Walker Art Center and many esteemed private collections. He was artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva FL and has been a visiting artist/lecturer at SCI-Arc, the School of the Art Institute Chicago, the Cranbrook Academy of Art and others. He’s also an on and off Professor in Practice, Architecture at the College of Design at the University of Minnesota.