Olivia Johnston Photographs

Olivia Johnston is an artist based in Ottawa, Canada. She is currently the Photographic History Instructor at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa, and was a finalist for the RBC Emerging Artist Award in 2017. Her work in lens-based media includes photo-based and multimedia work; Johnston makes use of numerous genres, including studio portraiture, self-portraiture, landscape, and still life, to explore and question gender, art history, beauty, vulnerability, memory, and the photographic image itself.

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Though infested with many bewildering anomalies, photographs are considered our best arbiters between our visual perceptions and the memory of them. It is not only their apparent ‘objectivity’ that grants photographs their high status in this regard, but our belief that in them, fugitive sensation has been laid to rest. ...practically speaking, we ritually verify what is there, and are disposed to call it reality. But, with photographs, we have concrete proof that we have not been hallucinating all our lives.

Max Kozloff

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can i have a chat back?

Carousel 016: can i have a chat back? audio piece 2017

This is the audio from my piece Carousel 016: can i have a chat back?

The piece was shown at Remixed Festival this year in the back of a truck. It was paired with slides that the viewer had to change while they listened.

The recordings depict some of my adventures in dating.

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Seydou Keïta. 

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Ruth Asawa amid several of her works, November 1954

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Vikky Alexander at Downs & Ross

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GREUZE, Jean-Baptiste Innocence c. 1790 Oil on panel, 63 x 53 cm Wallace Collection, London

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The images I create are a confluence of what is in front of me and what is inside of me. They are objective and subjective at the same time, and they must be seen that way by the viewer in order to be convincing.

James Nachtwey

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“Conchita Cintron, nineteen years old, and the greatest woman bullfighter in the world. Mexico, 1942.” Photograph by David Douglas Duncan

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Georges de Feure, artist (French, 1868–1943), Marcel Schwob (French, 1867–1905), La porte des rêves, Paris: Pour les Bibliophiles indépendants chez Henry Floury [Octave Uzanne], 1899. The Morgan Library & Museum.

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February 1994. ‘This is fashion’s virtual reality.’

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Love

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lions

‘The Tudor Pattern Book’, England ca. 1520

Bodleian Library, MS. Ashmole 1504, fol. 39r

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I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.

Diane Arbus, 1963

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Piero di Cosimo. portrait of a woman, thought to be Simonetta Vespucci

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Rineke Dijkstra.

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Each of us leaves evidence on the earth that in various ways bears our form.

When an animal, a rabbit, say, beds down in a protecting fencerow, the weight and warmth of his curled body leaves a mirroring mark upon the ground. The grasses often appear to have been woven into a birdlike nest, and perhaps were indeed caught and pulled around by the delicate claws as he turned in a circle before subsiding into rest. This soft bowl in the grasses, this body-formed evidence of hare, has a name, an obsolete but beautiful word: meuse. (Enticingly close to Muse, daughter of Memory, and source of inspiration.) Each of us leaves evidence on the earth that in various ways bears our form.

~ Sally Mann, from Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (Little, Brown and Company, May 12, 2015)