Artists On The Edge: Lance & Andi Olsen

North Idaho artist Andi Olsen says that she is “really interested in creating stuff that makes people’s brains itch.”

She could be speaking for her husband, writer Lance Olsen, as well.

The author of such provocatively titled fiction as “Tonguing the Zeitgeist” and “Sewing My Eyes Shut,” Lance Olsen admits that at age 13 he “fell in love with Franz Kafka.” That might explain his obsessive blending of such “avant-pop” themes as bioethics, technology and the nature of knowledge with an amphetamine-laced sense of plot and pace.

“I think of my work as taking a good amount of unhinged reality for granted,” he says, “and trying, in some shape or form, to wake people up in the midst of their dreaming, in the midst of their everyday, take-it-for-granted sort of lives.”

Andi Olsen’s art, meanwhile, explores what she calls “an aesthetic of the grotesque.” She says her current project, an ongoing series titled “Freakshow,” seeks to explore “that more human aspect of what it is to be a freak.”

The Olsens - she’s 41, he’s 44 - met nearly two decades ago in a class Lance Olsen was teaching at the University of Iowa. They seem to be the consummate urban couple. New York, say. Or Berlin.

Instead, they live on an 80-acre spread outside New Meadows, Idaho. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they drive north to Moscow, where Lance has been teaching English and creative writing at the University of Idaho since 1996.

Yet their respective artistic sensibilities remain, in a word, bizarre.

Lance Olsen’s 1994 novel “Tonguing the Zeitgeist” tells the story of an order-taker for a mail-order porno supplier who becomes a 21st-century rock-‘n’-roll star. Booklist called it a “densely packed, kaleidoscopic prose (work that) paints a nightmare vision of a near future spawned from our worst contemporary fears.”

Andi Olsen’s “Freakshow,” a version of which showed last year at Moscow’s Prichard Gallery, includes everything from a study of conjoined twins to what she says is a “computer-generated, collaborative collage text” (created with Lance) that examines the notion of supermodels as freaks.

As for doing such on-the-edge work in Idaho, home of the potato-themed postcard, Andi Olsen sees a distinction.

“I feel there’s a false binary created where if you live in Idaho you’re an Idaho artist,” she says, “as opposed to living in Idaho and being an artist.

“We’re really comfy in Idaho. We love it here.”

Artists on the edge Experience artists’ work in many ways