Jane Olin: Some Trees at the Monterey Museum of Art turns a small group of photographs into a sustained study of scale, attention and relation. On view from May 7 through August 23, 2026, the exhibition takes its title from John Ashbery and presents 15 works from Olin’s series Intimate Conversation, bringing her pinhole practice and alternative silver gelatin methods into focus.
Olin has built a reputation for slowing photography down. Her pinhole images trade sharp edges for atmosphere, letting light, distance and time shape the final print. In this exhibition, trees become more than a motif. They appear as subjects with form, weight and personality, while also suggesting a larger kinship between human life and the natural world. The grand scale of the works gives that idea room to breathe. What might seem like a simple view of trees becomes a question about how presence is felt, and how looking can move between detail and abstraction.
The exhibition’s title frames the work well. Ashbery’s poem is attentive to the way perception shifts, and Olin’s photographs do something similar. They invite close looking without forcing a single reading. The images hold on to individuality, but they also speak to memory, growth and the quiet persistence of living forms. That balance gives the series its particular force. It is not landscape as backdrop, but landscape as encounter.
Curated by Cydney Payton, the exhibition also gains context from a curator whose career has long moved across contemporary art, architecture and institutional change. That background suits Olin’s work, which carries both technical discipline and a strong sense of space. The photographs feel handmade and deliberate, yet open enough to let viewers dwell in their own associations.
Some Trees offers a measured, visually rich look at an artist who uses alternative processes not as novelty, but as a way of thinking through the world more carefully.
Image: Jane Olin (b. 1939), Intimate Conversation 10, The Surface of Meaning, 2017, 50 x 48.5 in. © Jane Olin
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