Karyn Olivier: How a Home is Made

Karyn Olivier’s artistic practice merges multiple histories and collective memory with present-day narratives. Through the manipulation of familiar objects and spaces, the artist re-contextualizes the viewer’s relationship to the ordinary. Questioning what we presume to be the function or facts of an object or space, she asks us to reconcile the immediate with the remembered. 

In How A Home Is Made Olivier explores themes of displacement, migration, and absence using discarded items and common construction materials. Combining these with photographic imagery, Olivier asks the viewer to reflect on building practices, excess consumption, and Western ideas of progress in late capitalist societies.

Driftwood, Door, Man, and Boat (Gorée Island/Matinicus Island) acts as a work of chronostratigraphy. A large piece of driftwood Olivier recovered from Maine is juxtaposed with an image she photographed from the Door of No Return at the House of Slaves in Senegal. It evokes the complexities of layered time: the weathered driftwood that wears its history and travel, the captured moment of a photo taken 13 years ago, the historical magnitude of the site, and even this current moment—as the loop is closed by the viewer in the gallery today, bearing witness to a fraught and troubled legacy.

In Grief and Loss (AZ Family Discount), an image of sample curtains displayed outside a discount home goods store in Olivier’s neighborhood in Philadelphia, is printed on drywall, attached to metal wall studs, and secured by sandbags. Curtains, which began as functional protection from the elements (serving as walls that kept out the weather), evolved over time as coveted decorative objects that conveyed notions of privacy, ownership, wealth and status. This work points to a purpose beyond necessity, a universal desire to make our homes “beautiful” that transcends economic circumstances.

Powers of 10 (Home kit), which references the Charles and Ray Eames film, displays the materials most frequently used in home construction in ten concentric rings. Positioned above the floor on a custom moveable dolly, the aggregate materials in this “kit” can be understood as a portal into geological time and our current epoch, the Anthropocene, which is defined by humankind’s impact on the planet. 

In the back gallery, the viewer is confronted with a wall of orange construction water-barriers, objects commonly found in single lines on city streets. Sampling (Need You) is an installation that incorporates discarded barriers, emptied of water and fitted with audio amplifiers that play sounds Olivier recorded at construction zones throughout Philadelphia. The soundscapes move from barrier to barrier, building site to building site, memorializing the continuous destruction, rebuilding, and expansion happening in cities across the US, while piecing together a portrait of one city in flux. On the adjacent wall is Drift, a video projection of a conveyor belt carrying construction debris, endlessly scrolling onward and out of the frame, like a flowing river.