Lovie Olivia: interiority complex

Houston, Texas - ART IS BOND. is proud to present interiority complex, a solo exhibition featuring the work of visual artist Lovie Olivia.

Lovie Olivia’s “interiority complex” aims to be a site of engagement, a visual reverie and survey of the florid poetics of Black Interiority. This body of work mines, retrieves and reimagines matter recovered from the cache of Black cultural production, i.e, art, music, literature, politics and design. It engages visually with a bounty of aesthetics, decorative remains, and rich detritus that persist in our culture despite pervasive Anti-Blackness, Homophobia and Sexism. Additionally, the exhibition prioritizes Queer, Southern, and Womanist contributions to American urbanity in hopes to jubilate the polylithic nature of the Black Diaspora. 

Olivia sparks fresh narratives by interlacing and contrasting gestures and marks of our collective expressions.  Obsessed with the materiality of plaster, preoccupied with design and zealous of painting she strives to add a fresh aesthetic to classical fresco techniques by employing a contemporary application. The paintings and objects are manifested through a non- traditional performance of excavation that cross-fertilises data, imagery and other minutiae with familiar motifs and patterns to communicate a sense of depth, monumentality and retrospection. The immersive environment of “interiority complex” reveres colloquial expressions of beauty, leisure, liberty and sovereignty. interiority complex opens on Friday April 14, 2023 at 6pm. 

About Lovie Olivia

Beauty, body, archeology, history, and intersectionality are recurring themes in Olivia’s ongoing multidisciplinary practice. Olivia’s paintings, prints, and installations reflect their interests in complex identities, cultural anthropology and social exchange through unusual methodologies. Olivia employs a modified process of fresco (including digital fresco) that experiments with abstraction and incorporates their visual language as a way 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 is 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.