Olivia Jia’s unconventional still lifes function as a way of organising disparate images, objects and ideas and their attendant personal and public histories. Contrary to the experience of hyperphantasia — the ability to conjure and recall images with extreme clarity and vividness, to “see,” with the mind’s eye — Jia describes her process of remembering through language. Thus, similarly to some mnemonic devices, Jia’s paintings construct architectures in which she houses the significant images in her mind, in an effort to carve them into reality, and ultimately to remember them.

In the space of Jia’s paintings, disparate images exist together, are pinned down and made tangible. Focusing on an image’s visual specificity and the metaphorical, narrative, and subtextual relationships that may be generated when two images are placed beside each other, the artist paints, sands, swaps, and repaints images in relation to one another until they hold an affect, a frisson, an allusion to something that cannot be named. 

In building a pictorial architecture to hold these images, Jia looks toward existing systems that we use to organise knowledge: institutions, books and papers, museums and archives and so forth. From these systems she borrows objects such as plinths, display cases, shelves, or the binding of a book, all of which become signifiers of a curatorial or editorial context, whilst the muted and often surreal colours of their depictions reiterate the unreality of the scene. Describing the subject of these paintings, Jia said, “this would be the space behind your eyelids. Or, psychological portraits. Or, what happens if the mind’s eye peers into a mirror.”

Olivia Jia (b. 1994, Chicago, IL) is a Philadelphia-based painter. She received a BFA from the University of the Arts in 2017. Honors include the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2015 and the President’s Award at the University of the Arts. She has exhibited at venues including Dongsomun in Seoul, South Korea and Marginal Utility, New Boone, and Space 1026 in Philadelphia, PA.