The work references the history of portraiture in general but specifically, portraiture in photography especially in the 19^th century when elaborate backdrops were employed as a way of connecting photography in painting through references to the picturesque. So many things are going on where the painting meets the floor, between two and three dimensions, between photographic and painterly traditions, where different kinds of illusion meet. If Wasow took a purely conceptual approach to making images that would be enough but I appreciate that is only one aspect of the work; it is essential, braided into the overall meaning of the work, but not the reason for embarking on such a project. Wasow is making earnest images of people he is close to; they are anchored through an emotional connection, yet exist in a kind of fantasy space or constructed space. There is a lot going on yet they are relatively straightforward images. They are smart yet understated.
--Mark Alice Durant, St Lucy Press, 2015

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“The stock in trade of supermarket tabloids and holy grail of conspiracy theorists, images of UFOs test the relationship between photography and belief.. Unlike the countless photographs that seek to prove the existence of flying saucers, Wasow’s photographs instead use the idea of the extraterrestrial aircraft to subject his own medium to scrutiny. “While I don’t have that much interest in UFOs themselves,” Wasow has admitted, “I am interested in photographs of UFOs and the questions that come to mind when looking at them - "what is it? Is it real?" – Many of his haunting pictures appears to depict a penumbral UFO hovering above an apocalyptic terrain, but rather than providing solid evidence, the murky contours indecipherable topography invite speculation the murky contours and indecipherable typography invite speculation instill uneasiness.
Wasow courts doubt by distorting found images and running them through a battery of processes. The result is a blindingly unfamiliar landscape, suggesting but never revealing what the artist called “the existence and the mystery of other perhaps imaginary, times and places” The evidentiary capacity of photography, which has so long fought to distinguish it from other media, is purposefully diminished in Wasow’s work. Indeed, some subjects are more at home in the twilight of speculation than in the stark light of reason”

--Mia Fineman, Catalog Essay for “Faking It”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014

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“For the "exteriors," Wasow inverts this relationship of nature and culture. His landscapes - bucolic, banal and/or sublime - bear the imprint of the manmade. There are buildings, roads, power lines, and culverts. Sometimes the relationships are harmonious but, more often, the evidence of man's works functions as a poisonous beauty.
Wasow's pictures are romantic, which brings me back to Frederick Church, Caspar David Friedrich, Ansel Adams, Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead - all romantics in my book and here's why I make the amalgam: 1) Computer graphics have created a resurgence of interest in representation, and 19th century realist painters were some of the last artists able to resist repositioning themselves to accommodate for the photographic image. So Wasow's interest in (and, in the past, occasional appropriation) 19th century painting makes quite a bit of sense. 2) The American landscape is the linchpin of American photography and, like Adams (or millions of other amateur and professional photographers), Wasow hits the American highways and National Parks to snap scenes which he later inserts in his photo works. 3) The cinema has always been about collage, albeit time-based. Most of the last century saw artists (including photographers) employing collage as some sort of response to that dominant art form. Most of those collages were not about seamlessness - Wasow's works are. And that brings me to the special effect. Special effects artist Douglas Trumbull and the visionary designer Syd Mead created the beautiful dystopia of Blade Runner, an aesthetic that has inspired several generations of "commercial" and "fine" American artists, including Wasow. Blade Runner's F/X was still very much film and set ("bricks and mortar" in today's computer parlance) dependent; but they pioneered the computer effects that Wasow uses on his desktop today. “

--Dike Blair, “Oliver Wasow”, The Thing, 2000.

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Oliver Wasow works more like an archaeologist, sifting through annals of recent photography. Just as archaeologists favor ancient garbage dumps for the mother lode of information they provide about a past culture, Wasow's "Expansible Catalogue" also focuses on junk—or at least the kind of photography that doesn't make it into art-history books. Wasow's photos, displayed in a hodgepodge of sizes and frames, are hybrids of pictures he took and joined digitally with images cribbed from unidentified sources. Certain themes repeat: the digits of historically significant years ("1945" looming tall over a heap of rubble); an abandoned wagon wheel
surrounded by tufts of prairie grass; a retro-futuristic landscape with domes protruding from the ground. Some of Wasow's interventions are so subtle that it's hard at first to tell what he's done, though others contain more obvious fantastical elements (like a landscape lodged in a living room). But what's funny is media sources—what many of these images are supposed to "mean." The isolated wagon wheel signifies the sacrifice and hardship of our western-bound forebears; the huge year dates and the domes, some kind of post-apocalyptic future.
What's also interesting about Wasow's project, though, is what it tells us about how we read photography. Art photography was and is about staking out a signature style, while vernacular photography is interesting for almost the opposite reason: Certain weird tropes get codified and repeated over and over.
Only, in Wasow's work, the familiar and the strange mix together to create a new, expanded (Expansible!) vocabulary of images.
--Martha Schwendener, The Village Voice, July, 8, 2007

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“On the photographic evidence alone, it would scarcely be illogical to infer that Oliver Wasow is the last man on earth. His expertly manipulated, uninhabited color photographs have been compared to Romantic landscape paintings for their sense of sublimity, desolation, and grandeur; but the suggestively postapocalyptic scenes they depict are less landscapes than sites--landscape neutralizes any link between history and a given location (one would never refer to Treblinka as a landscape), while site suggests a place where something definite has transpired (Hiroshima, site of the first atomic bomb exploded in warfare). And with nearly every one of Wasow's photographs, you get the sense something happened there--that a bomb has gone off, the sky has gone out, or the earth has gone up in flames.”

-- Keith Seward, Art forum International, Jan. 1994

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“Wasow’s product, in fact, is as alluring as the commodities of advertising fictions; the deliberate opacity of the images’ original forms combined with their small scale make them seem at once irretrievably distant and disconcertingly proximate, producing oscillating sensations of familiarity and alienation in the viewer. As constructs of both fact and fiction, they are prime exponents of the world we now inhabit, a place where the real and the imaginary are interchangeable.”

-- Rosetta Brooks, “Oliver Wasow, ‘Is it Real, What is it?’, Artnews Magazine, Feb., 1988

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“Wasow's lush surreal orchestrations of nature and culture gone awry in the hothouse environment of his digitized imagination are haunting examples of the new cyber-reality being pioneered by artists today. Beyond collage or mere futurism, Wasow examines the evolution of our utopian ideals and ways the paradigm of the past influences the transmission of idealism into the future. Wasow's landscapes concoct a crisis of legibility for the viewer--they are radically discontinuous in terms of time (are they past or future); space (are they microscopic or vast); and nature (what is man-made and what is not). Wasow's works are composite portraits--archives embedded in photographs of a world where nature is confused with its multiple representations. “
--David Joselit, “Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in recent Sculpture and Photography”, 1988