DVAA Member since 2023

Olivia Guarnieri

2025 DVAA RESIDENT

WEBSITE: oliviaguarnieri.myportfolio.com

INSTAGRAM: @ohteagee

About:

Olivia Guarnieri is a visual artist who received a BA from Vassar College in 2020, where she studied English, media studies, and studio art, and presented a senior thesis on object-oriented ontology. Since living in Philadelphia, Olivia has shown work in various gallery spaces including Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Creative York (York, PA), CICA (Gimpo, KOR), dodomu gallery (virtual), and The Rest Gallery (Ithaca, NY). In 2023, she attended a residency at Arts Letters & Numbers, and completed a summer studio critique program at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This summer, Olivia worked as a part-time archivist in Beacon, NY, and was a resident at Cornell’s Image Text Workshop.

Artist Statement:

With commonly found materials such as wood, paper, and cardboard, Olivia Guarnieri constructs visual “sentences” that incorporate grammatical structures and typographical symbols into non-word forms. She is interested in working on a spectrum that has words at one end and images at the other, and exploring questions of how aligned with or estranged from one another these two forms of expression can be. What situations make words and images feel like synonyms of each other, and in what ways do they exist as opposites? Often occupying both a linguistic and a visual space, her constructions use a sparse, narrow language as a strategy to achieve qualities of secrecy, specificity, and uncertainty—all attributes that she finds become intensified by a heightened degree of restrictions and a lack of given information.