ARTIST
STATEMENT
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.
ALTERNATIVE
ARTIST
STATEMENT
Andy Allen-Olivar
Andy Allen-Olivar likes to write on his hand.
On the day when he writes this his hand says:
Who can run faster?1
Document stolen baby pics
Building code for Erik 2406
Look up Ida’s mercury guy2
Post tape to Louis
_______________________________ 1 This one is written illegibly but I remember writing it so I know what it says. However I can’t remember why I wrote it.B is fo...3
yogurt4
2 Actually this is a great but I will probably tell it wrong. There was this old Danish guy who they believe died of mercury poisoning - and what with the marvels of medical science, they decided to exhume him – dug him up, plucked a little hair from his rotting Plenty and tested it. What they found that in the last two months of his life (or was it four?) he didn’t have any mercury in his system, but rather an abnormal amount of gold and silver.
3 At this point the rest is too faded and I can’t remember what it was supposed to say.
4 For breakfast.
