Olivia Booth
Anima Reflections
January 13th - February 4th
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 13th, 7-10pm
Monte Vista is pleased to present Anima Reflections, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist, Olivia Booth. Booth creates assemblages of glass and chalk drawings that explore perception, mediation and the role of technology in personal and collective reflection.
In Anima Reflections, she presents a new, eponymously titled diptych for the corner wall. It is accompanied by glass floorboard pieces opposite, and an artist’s book identifying and expanding on the images tracked across the work.
Booth’s medium is a mesh of elements, familiar yet unexpectedly configured. Elements of transparent, semi-transparent, opaque and mirrored glass (along with plastic) frame, contain, shape and obscure drawn elements rendered by hand in soft chalk. Visible hardware operates functionally and aesthetically– punctuating space and yielding details of interest.
Drawing is central to Booth's practice, from notational sketchbook drawing (as seen in her artist's books) to the wall works. Her hand is fluid and gestural as she records encounters from daily experience. Subjects range from informational, to entertainment, to family life. Across the moments that call her attention, Booth is conscious of both the image and its mediated delivery— a mirror, a window, a vitrine, or so often, the screen.
In Anima Reflections, and throughout Olivia Booth’s work, glass is removed from its picture window role. It is glass that has been modified with artistry– blown, slumped, fused, cobbled, drilled or cut. (To create these elements Booth often collaborates with glass artists.) Layered into her assemblage-tableaux, the sculptural glass generates a dynamic interplay between image and surface. This enmeshment, which includes the varied hardware and implements that structurally and conceptually adjoin them, is the pictorial substance of the artwork. It is a uniquely robust– responsive and inclusive– kind of picture making, one that contains and reflects on itself, and the forms of mediation central in contemporary life.
“Anima Reflections is about the daily dance between opacity and transparency, and how we transition between those rightful states as we interconnect with our worlds. It’s about how self-reflection comes to pass– individually and collectively– in those undulating states, and how glass– as mirror, window and, above all, screen– are inextricably involved in this dance.” — Olivia Booth
Olivia Booth has been making art and teaching in Los Angeles since moving from New York City over 20 years ago. In recent years her work could be seen at Irenic Projects, LA, UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, Goldfinch Gallery in Chicago, and Pilchuck Gallery in Seattle. Over the years her work has been shown at spaces like Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, SculptureCenter, The Finley Gallery and The Schindler House, in addition to other exhibition spaces, and has been written about in Art Forum and the LA Times among other publications. She teaches college classes in drawing and also teaches drawing from her own studio, The Drawing Studio, and she feels fortunate to be in constant dialogue with students. She was last a student herself at Art Center College of Design, where she received her MFA in 2003, and before that at Cornell University, where she received her BFA and BA with honors.