Olivia DiVecchia
Interview with the artist based in New York, USA (Upstate and New York City). The dynamic, between what she names opacity and the unwieldy desire to grid it out, is the core interest of her practice.
Olivia DiVecchia is an artist working across drawing, sculpture, photography, video, sound and text. DiVecchia’s often recursive practice works to develop systems whose logics are followed through multiple points of translation and mutation. At the center of her work is an enduring interest in the failure of meaning as we know it; in the way that the singular presence of things is dissimulated in various regimes of knowledge; in opacity as a general condition.
Her work plays with what a world initiated by this haunting can be. With the way in which reaching to know is inherently colonial, all too easily opening a quantitative, extractive orientation to the world. This dynamic, between what she names opacity and the unwieldy desire to grid it out, is the core interest of her practice.
She received a BFA in studio art from Southern Methodist University in 2010 and an MFA in studio art from Hunter College in 2020. Her work has been exhibited in both Dallas and New York. She lives and works between upstate and New York, New York.
Website: www.oliviadivecchia.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/odivecchia
Olivia DiVecchia was recommended by Johanna Strobel.
How do you think about what your work is? What is your practice like?
I would describe my work as precise, obviously labor and time intensive, always hinting at an underlying system or logic, but one that is not fully revealed in the art object itself. Lately this is manifested in large scale, highly detailed mesh-like drawings that reference the language of mapmaking and architectural drawing. Ultimately, I think I would like the art to exist as a kind of contradiction between the clarity of a precise logic or system and a deeper opacity or constitutive mystery.
In practice, being guided by this contradiction means I have a hard time starting from scratch. I always try to unfold new projects out of work and systems of meaning I developed before. I like to make work by building up a series of tasks that when followed, make the work. Over time these tasks become like rules that when pushed in the studio through repetition and time, bend, transform, open into new terrain. I like to think of it as a process of unfolding.
When you feel stuck, how do you get un-stuck?
I like to have enough space to have a few things going at once so that when I get stuck in one place I can keep it moving by jumping into another piece. This is what I had been missing for some time working in small home studios in NYC and what I am hoping shifts in my new space.
When I have been really stuck in the past, I have turned to photography, which is my first medium. There is something calming about collecting images with the idea that what anything “means” or will be can be figured out later in a kind of editing or assembling process.
I think I take this approach into other mediums too, I like to collect materials, small actions or tasks, methods and sources and not think too much, just let time in the studio and repetition unfold and assemble a system of making.
What makes an artwork “good” in your opinion? Why?
I think what I look for in artwork is not a discrete object that is beautiful or well executed or what have you, but something that acts as a signpost, a residue almost, of a whole world or thinking, meaning and practice. I also resonate with things whose meaning remains open, whose future is not written and fixed in the moment of its making. Things that have a certain density.
What would you like to explore further?
I am very curious about sound work and would love to find ways to bring this into my work in more developed fermented ways than I have so far been able to. I have done some things with sound, but I feel like a total amateur in that realm. Not that there’s anything wrong with being an amateur!
What does your studio mean to you in your making and art?
Lately I have been renovating a space upstate to be my new studio. So I am in a bit of a pause in making, and looking forward to seeing what the new space brings to my work. In times where I am not making as much it can be easy to lose sight of the drive to make.
I think this is because for me that drive is completely intertwined with the constant cultivation of a space for thinking that takes place by just showing up in the studio and building that kind of rhythm where one’s focus can shift and open into the spaces where thinking about meaning making and art’s place in all of that is possible. It is a different register than the one occupied in daily life, work, and all that.
That being said I am also very driven to find and spend time in that headspace because it has always enriched the way I can engage with others, with conversation, friendship and deep connection which is maybe the most important thing to me. So in that sense I think of art, at its best, as a way to be in the world with other people in more beautiful and full ways.
