Photographer Karyn Olivier will talk next week at York University about her artistic practice and how it explores people’s relationships to everyday objects and spaces.
The event, Eye Around Matter, will take place Wednesday, Feb. 25, from 2:30 to 4:30pm, at 305 York Lanes, Keele campus.
“I will discuss my use of conflicting histories, memories, narratives and identities to confound and question presumed knowns,” says Olivier, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and is currently a professor of sculpture at the Tyler School of Art.
The talk will address her manipulation and reinterpretation of art historical movements, such as minimalism, and examine how her work attempts to wrestle and collapse the past with the present.
She will also discuss her use of “blind spots” – the under-considered spaces people occupy as sites for activation. These sites aim to be democratic, granting agency to anyone who acknowledges this potential and decides to claim it.
Olivier will examine her Caribbean ancestry in relationship to several projects, which address the collective experience of the diaspora, as well as personal narratives and memories from her birth country.
Olivier’s work has been exhibited internationally, including: exhibitions at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials in Korea; the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Dakar, Senegal; the Wanas Foundation in Sweden; the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and more.
She is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award and a Creative Capital Foundation grant.
For more information, visit the Centre for Research on Latin American and the Caribbean website.