Here is a fragmented book, with marbled paper covers, an image of the cosmos, painted in muted grays, and a book plate that is simultaneously legible as a reader reading and as a map of a coastal outcropping. The ribbon, once a marker of place and progress within the structure of the book, is disembodied, pointing nowhere.

This painting is about knowledge-seeking, confrontations with the unknowable, moments where language fails. It contains the extremes of distance—the closeness and intimacy of the book and its promises, and the cosmos, the deepest distance that there is—ironically enmeshed, containing everything that exists between these extremes, and yet nothing of it. 

What is lost in cropping, and framing, and becoming a part of a page?

Olivia Jia

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Olivia Jia