I am driven by the idea of the forced and voluntary migration of people from the Caribbean region and the struggle to navigate spaces that are both familiar and unfamiliar. My work is invested in strategies for survival, the relationships humans form with other creatures and with the natural environment, and the influences these elements have on the formation of identity within the spaces we inhabit. I am particularly intrigued by mimicry in nature and the ways in which plants, insects, and animals utilize it to survive.

 My work gestates in the space between the dream world and our experience of history, memory, and propaganda narratives. Here spirits play at the edges of the psyche, born out of anxiety, whimsy, spiritual yearning, and sexual fantasy. I seek to project vibrations that echo our disorganized and unfocused consciousness, and murmur with the promise of stranger forms yet to be conceived.

 I build paintings using graphics almost entirely from video games I’ve never played. I work not from a sense of nostalgia but rather from a late twentieth-century shape of thought, augmented by art history, that best describes how I feel visual cognition and memory factoring into the mechanics of understanding paintings. I sift through decades of screenshots and sprite rips to pick out objects with potential to build meaningful images, but my ultimate concern is the visual. I love the lightly abstracted distillations of familiar objects, which I think of as having been

I combine paintings with wallpapers to distill complex research into a cohesive visual space, shifting the stories we tell about women, art history, and the natural world. My work is densely detailed and slightly surreal, hybridizing the bright colors and 1990s pop aesthetic of Lisa Frank with wide-ranging art historical references. My current project, Impossible Garden, explores the lives of historical women artist-naturalists through paintings and wallpaper constructed out of their illustrations.

Olivia Springberg is a multi-media artist from Washington, DC. She is currently studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Charged by tactility and material exploration, her work employs various media, including sound, sculpture, and printmaking. Her pieces play off remembrances, visions, and feelings, presenting carefully manipulated narratives. Her work serves as a meditation—a way of dissecting and evaluating relationships, both inter and intrapersonal.

My work addresses and explores my personal experiences as an African American male living with Sickle Cell Anemia. Within my work I use the figurative forms of the sickle and normal cell in environments that depict the internal states of being that I’ve experienced throughout my lifetime. I explore abstract realms such as uncertainty, desire, longing, faith, perseverance, structure/lack of structure, fragility, and conflict through the process of painting.

My work is about attention span, babies, canaries, description, extracts, filters, grouping, hums, importance, jelly, kerning, looming, motion sensors, nerves, order, parity, qwerty, respite, smallness, stillness, tact, understanding, vanity, the West, xenophobias, yeses, and zeros.

I create paintings of sun-drenched domestic spaces that celebrate the quiet moments of everyday life. My paintings are an opportunity for me to play with and piece together things I love into a painting: books of favorite artists, coffee cups and candlesticks, walls filled with family portraits, and art by friends. I wear my influences on my sleeve, sometimes using a Vuillard inspired pattern and including his book open on the table or showing a favorite Lois Dodd piece on the wall of my kitchen. I use light and pattern as tools for abstraction.

Plaster is to a house as fabric is to a quilt; both are materials transformed to aid our need for warmth and shelter. In my work, paintings are images sprung from recollection and fantasy, while objects encompass real and psychological rooms. Each manifestation reflects a distinct place and period of time, while all of the work assembled evolves over time. My work allows a viewer to use commonly understood symbols and mementos in order to freely associate with their own identities and stories. I want my work to challenge how we name a thing through the re-contextualization of materials.