Show Two | 04.17.2026
Oliver Ito
PAINTING & DRAWING
Photographs; singularities plucked from the vastness of time. Drawing on personal archives and found images, photographs that are both familiar and alien. Images that are simultaneously vessels of ancestral memories and far off places. By collaging photography and painting, I aim to highlight socio-political relationships: forcing historically charged images to live among present political circumstances.
Attempting to make sense of a senseless world, my practice contextualizes a landscape bombarded with information overload, post-colonial baggage, and capitalistic money mongering as a citizen navigating the United States. Nicholas Mirzoeff, in his book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, defines the term visuality: a set of sight based mechanisms that structure the world. How then can visuality, through the visual arts, engage with methods of resistance?
Visual observation becomes another method of research from which I contextualize my world, utilizing the seeing powers of the eye and the camera. Through the pairing of these images and painted material, visual observation becomes obstructed in a rebus of beauty and devastation–something sensible to the eye and rational to the heart.