Olivia Guterson

I engage in an evolving multidisciplinary practice that is a collaboration with my ancestors through prayer, listening, divination, and working with and through the archives that manifest in visual offerings. While I belong to and/or in the African and also the Jewish diaspora, there is an experienced displacement and a dispersal, and also a claiming and a locatedness simultaneously experienced. This is foundational to my practice and has necessitated the crafting of language, tools, and textural movements that uplift the spatial organization strategies and technologies historically and presently known within the Black diaspora, more specifically privileging the innate wisdom and practices of Black women, which is intimately connected to survival.  Relying heavily on iteration, repetition, a sort of remixing, and call-and-response, conversations become embedded within my offerings which simultaneously answer and question themselves while in turn becoming an underlying algorithmic structure of commands, instructions, and locations.

Concepts of margins and centers, integration and separation, placement and displacement, migration and settlement, negotiation and navigation are constantly being examined, questioned, manipulated, and ultimately dictate my materials, forms, and marks. Most of my offerings have come to feel like an extension of my body highlighting my methods of navigation and serving as a way of seeing myself back to myself. Often using my hair brushes and afro picks to apply and manipulate my materials and surfaces, I at times adorn the works with beads, seeds, beans, earth, and thread. The obsessive intricacy of my mark-making and material layering is underscored by the fractured grids and overall geometric compositions, resulting in visual experiences that feel both in time and beyond time and seek to uncover new vantage points revealed in the archives that tell new or truer stories of how we’ve survived and how we’ll continue to survive. 

I am interested in how we survived.

I am interested in how we are surviving.

I am interested in how we get free.

photo by @light.arc.studio