Brooklyn, New York
100 West 3rd Floor Studio
Transfixed and troubled by the interaction between the light and architecture of the 100 West 3rd-Floor Studio, artist Olivia DiVecchia creates a site-specific experiment. She films the two-hour migration of light across the studio walls at dawn, taking a screenshot of the location of the light every three minutes. This repetition, combined with the slow modulation of the light, produces a series of images from which Olivia creates drawings, etchings, and prints. The next stage in the artist’s process involves translating this visual record into a sound score.
Olivia’s intensely philosophical explorations push Western Civilization’s commitment to rationalism to its breaking point. Her drawings are, on the one hand, cartographic products of order and yet also dizzyingly labyrinthine. In them, a sequence of iterative motions generated by a fly trapped in a window (pre-rational), the artist’s hand (rational), and technological processes (post-rational), spin out webs upon webs of meaning over which she superimposes a grid. The positive and negative spaces created through Olivia’s painstakingly recursive practice weave a net that traps the viewer—much like the fly— yet, the net itself becomes tangled in the process and threatens to tear.
The vertiginous tension animating Olivia’s works does more than replicate the established matrix of binary thinking; it drops us over the edge of the grid into new possibilities. From the arbitrary and absurd origins of a fly trapped in a window, how might meaning be created? How might we escape the grid?
