"[9] She received recognition for this work in the 1980s and 1990s through solo exhibitions at The Kitchen,[19] Artists Space,[20] Gallery Nature Morte[21] and Metro Pictures in New York,[22][23] and Margo Leavin in Los Angeles.
[2][4][6] Her inquiries often involve perception and the quirkiness of physical phenomena, exploring subjects across different media, while marking and collapsing distinctions between objects, images, memory and embodied experience.
[8][7][5][6][4] In the 1980s, Bolande's art centered on found image and object assemblages that New York Times critic Holland Cotter described as "a kind of controlled recycling characterized by low-key wit, lively inventiveness and a subtle eye for metaphor.
"[23] The work explored processes of reproduction and reception involving sound and sight, accumulating oblique meanings by stacking, resizing and reframing fragmentary, intangible and peripheral events and motifs—among them, the ignored furniture in porn movies, inert Marshall amplifiers and speaker cones, vintage refrigerator doors.
It was a delicate cast-porcelain rendering of Harold Edgerton's iconic, high-speed 1957 image of a splashing milk drop in which she converted the ephemeral into the solidly permanent, commenting on the original's effort to capture the invisible.
[7] The architectural, stainless-steel framed sculpture featured backlit night photographs of windows revealing high-modernist office interiors or rows of used washing machines that Artforum's Katy Siegel noted for their "spooky melancholy," humanity and loneliness.
[36] Inviting both a double take and acknowledgment of an ongoing economic downturn in viewers, she hung drapery printed with the graphic image of plywood inside the empty windows, mimicking the familiar sight of boarded-up storefronts.
[28][38][9] It began with Image Tomb (2014), an examination of history as a vertical accumulation of layers, represented by a stack of New York Times newspapers through which she tunneled by cutting a deep rectangular channel to excavate a picture of skeletons below.
[9][1][28] She used the excised pieces to create the project's centerpiece, a film composed of roughly 400 pairs of side-by-side fragments ordered in their original sequence, which appeared and faded in a rhythmic flow set to a score of percussive found and synthesized sounds.