Andy Allen-Olivar is a multimedia based artist working with photography, film, installation, text and most recently performance.
My artistic endeavours unfold using the absence and control of light and optics – darkrooms, lightboxes, camera obscuras, dia-slideshows, burials, lost stories. Imagery to find ghosts and traces of illumination and meaning.
Using these, I aim to research feelings of ephemerality and a way of seeing. To create a constellation of details – personal, historical, observed, speculative, overheard. The details are hard to explain, but when placed together, they become something that perhaps could be defined, but I feel something would be lost if we tried to do so.
My work is dedicated to scientists and hoarders and those who bend their knees to see; to diggers and explorers; to what is written on the back of things, and to what is not; to unelaborated memories, and pasts which somehow rhyme with them; to pasts that are not necessarily one’s own; to history, to language and to ventriloquism, to traces and to rituals; to shortcomings; to a place changed over time; to hangovers and jet lag; to constructivist anthropology, parallel presents, slow magic; to the flavour and vividness of trying for a long time; to the thing that is missing and defines what it is missing from; to saving it for later; to the familiar, unconnected, out of reach; to myth; to proof; to knowing how something works, and still be surprised and humbled by it anyway; to hold something up to the light and feel the gravity in your feet.
Previously, he worked in the postal industry.