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Primer:
Olivia Jia
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Workplace is pleased to launch its latest episode in the Primer series, where a new work by a gallery artist is unveiled online as a means to explore their wider practice.
Presented here is a new work from Olivia Jia’s ongoing book series. Pages of fictional manuscripts become the framework for unconventional still lifes, in which she recontextualizes disparate images from her own archive of collected ephemera.
Through a closer look at untitled (January flowers) and the process behind the creation of the work, this online presentation will focus on the function the artist's extensive archive holds within her practice and her particular interest in the relation between images and knowledge creation.
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"untitled (January flowers) is not a straightforward still life as it might appear. I am referencing here various images from my archive - images taken at night, shadows and other things that were in my mind whilst making this painting."
- Olivia Jia, 2021
Olivia Jiauntitled (January flowers), 2021Oil on panel (framed)25.5 x 33.3 cm
10 1/8 x 13 1/8 in(OJ014) -
Details of Olivia Jia, untitled (January flowers), 2021
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I am interested in the metaphorical potential of books as containers of knowledge.
In my paintings, the book isn't so much of a literal object as it is a vehicle to pull together the various sources in my life, in history and art history that have relationships in terms of content, ranging from formal to metaphorical and emotional connections. The book is both the thing that can hold the content of the paintings and what allows me to think about all of the paintings in relation to one another. Even if in all the paintings the books might be of different scale, they function so similarly as containers of my practice. I think of each painting as one page in the book of what I am doing in the studio.
- Olivia Jia, 2021
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The archive is at the heart of my practice.
It allows me to collect a variety of moments from my experience as a human being, and in drawing from it to create my paintings I am recontextualising this experience.
- Olivia Jia, 2021
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