Exhibitions

​LOVIE OLIVIA: SPACE SCAPE

Tinney Contemporary / 237 Rep. John Lewis Way N. October 10 - November 15th

Lovie Olivia

Space Scape showcases Olivia’s interdisciplinary works in collage, assemblage, painting and installation, engaging multiple archives of historically marginalized communities. Her luminous processes explore modalities of retreat, resistance, rebellion and liberation. She employs distinct multilayered collage strategies by mining records, remixing archival documents and manila folders into quilt-like works with flowing forms that transgress the rigid structure of the file folder. Displayed alongside the collage works, Olivia’s vivid, multilayered “nu-fresco” paintings grapple with memory and history by excavating cumulative layers of image, disrupting pictorial space by carving away plaster.

Both methods visually consider the complexities of identity, place-keeping and record-keeping; challenging systems of forced categorization, disrupting attempted erasure, and prioritizing restoration. The works have a transcendental bent—the artist literally cuts portals into her material containers, rupturing the picture plane, unveiling networks of data and imagery—leading the viewer beyond the frame: out of facile, reductive categories and into an engagement with history, with the cosmos, and with their own place in it. Space Scape is a record of this act of remembering, of strategizing, of improvisation, ingenuity and futurity.