Olivia Springberg
BIOGRAPHY
Olivia Springberg is a multi-media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Charged by tactility and material exploration, her work often employs sculptural ornamentation. Her pieces play off remembrances, dreams, and feelings, presenting carefully manipulated narratives through multilayered imagery. Springberg is interested in personal interpretation and individual association, crafting work that is simultaneously objective and subjective. Her work serves as a meditation, a way of dissecting and evaluating relationships, both inter and intrapersonal. In Olivia Springberg's dreamlike paintings, abstract figures are blurred and out of focus, permeating her multi-layered visual language. Exploring the difference between memory and reality, selected emotional moments are given weight, commenting on their influence and power. The paintings entail sculptural framing with organic edges that transcend the work beyond the picture plane into objecthood, encouraging an exploration of the boundaries between fictional space and reality.
ARTIST STATEMENT
No one knows exactly why we dream, and I am a sucker for a good mystery. I have these vivid dreams, and I like to tell people about them. I like being a storyteller. So I have focused on using imagery from dreams to inform and inspire my work. Translating dreams serves as a meditation that brings the act of remembrance into my artistic practice. By investigating the duality between the realm of memory and my range of experience, I can better understand and visualize a collection of subconscious imagery, fictions and realities. I am interested in the idea of navigating an impossible space and exploring this through transparency and transience. I play with the essence of figures and spaces, choosing moments of specificity and ambiguity, as nothing is quite clear in a dream, and in the dream world, anything goes. Reflecting on a world that is both familiar and alien, there comes a desire to change the boundaries of the painted surface. The image is brought into three dimensions, becoming distorted or abstracted, or is permitted to expand beyond the rectangle or is extended outside of the canvas through framing and ornamentation. Framing acts like a portal, containing another world, while the non-rectangular surfaces allow the dreamworld to extend into our world. The composition of the structure itself creates a volume or perimeter that extends, contains, or interferes with the painted object, echoing an unfamiliar terrain.
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