Open Studio with artist Clare Olivares

Friday 9 October 2015, 6:30-8:00pm
In Khmer and English translation
Sa Sa Art Projects, White Building

Sa Sa Art Projects' Pisaot artists-in-residence Clare Olivares will open her studio sharing work and reflection from her past four-weeks stay. During her residency, Olivares has produced a visual diary of observations and impressions, transforming her Phnom Penh daily living experience of the familiar and the unfamiliar into a series of painting of fleeting moments and lasting memories. She has also made a series of found poems, composed of text taken from her partner’s physics textbooks and images she directly painted and intervened on the pages. Alongside these new works, Olivares will also show her Still Point (2011-2014), a series of plaster pieces of photographs she took of biological specimens while working in a zoology museum, and photograph transfer works by students at the White Building resulted from a workshop they took with her.

Clare Olivares’s (b. 1951, Fresno, California) artistic practice encompasses painting, mixed media and poetry. An overarching theme of her work is memory and place, usually drawing from personal observations of daily life. Olivares explains, “We define ourselves and our communities through our personal and collective memories. Our narratives are based on what we remember not what we forget. I attempt in my work to highlight a sense of awe regarding the world and our collective obsession with its mysteries.”

Olivares has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Alexandria Museum of Art, University of San Francisco, Berkeley Art Center, Richmond Art Center, art space Dotouan, Kala Art Institute, Laguna Gloria Art Museum and Gallery Irohani. She earned her undergraduate degree in Studio Art and Art History from the University of California at Berkeley and her MFA in Painting from Mills College in Oakland, California. Olivares lives and works in Oakland, California. More about Clare Olivares at www.clareolivares.com.

Clare Olivares’s residency is kindly supported by Residency Unlimited, New York City, through Residency Unlimited Residency Raffle Fundraiser 2014.