Lovie Olivia is an autodidact multidisciplinary artist who employs painting, printmaking, collage and installation works that engage with the archives of multiple marginalized embodiments. Her practice takes cues from the decorative, ornamental and pop arts miscellany and considers the poetics of Black historic, visual vernacular, Domestic interiority, Southern hospitality and Queer aesthetics through a profusion of mediums and methodologies. Her work aims to disrupt the preexisting art canon by prioritizing variations on cultural models. Olivia’s work further explores these concurrent corporealities with culturally loaded materials from the past like Plaster. Her usage of plaster adopts an au courant process of fresco-secco, buon fresco and castings specific to her style. Her Collages utilizes clinical files in concert with layers of extracted refuse and incised renderings fabricated into compelling works on paper and Sculptures that gesture to the archaic and futurist optics of design that when arranged into museful installations, beckon the viewer with curiosity and inquiry. Olivia’s practice is informed by the simultaneity of Black, Southern, Queer, Womanist existance and is manifested through a performances of excavation that furnishes a liminal landscape for her to explore the multidimensionality of marginalised Americans. Joy, liberation, jubilee, pleasure and leisure keep score and these notions do not relent; instead they serve as sparks to her radically creative impulses.

Beauty, body, archeology, history, and intersectionality are recurring themes of my ongoing multidisciplinary practice.  My paintings, prints, and installations reflect my interests in complex identities, cultural anthropology and social exchange through unusual methodologies.  I employ a personally modified process of fresco (including digital fresco) that  experiments with abstraction and incorporates my  visual language as ways of exploring themes of race, gender, power, sexuality and the different value systems attached to them. 

By manipulating layers of information including secco-fresco paintings and objects in concert with pigmented overlays, marks and monotypes that merge the worlds of painting, printmaking and sculpture. These multi-dimensional works embody stratums of data and scores through a seductive queer-ing of materials and assemblage. This marriage of archaic and modern materiality are used to honor the zeal of painting, celebrate the decorative and domestic and utilize the art of excavation while carefully exploring human histories, specifically the histories of  queer women of color.

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