Through and With Images: Artist Strategies of (In)Visibility
Listen to Hamiltonian mentor Gina Osterloh discuss artist strategies by women of color who amplify their relationship to visibility, invisibility, and the function of representation, through photography and video. Artists discussed include Nao Bustamante, Antonia Wright, and Stephanie Syjuco.
About the artist
Gina Osterloh’s photography and conceptual art takes the form of printed photographs, film, video, sculptural forms, and performance. Her work often depicts mark-making and her own body traversing, tracing, and puncturing photographic space in a quest to interrogate preconceived notions of identity, and the formation of self and Other. Through the desire to create new contexts for being, Osterloh’s photographs depict meticulously constructed large scale photo tableau environments as well as drawing on photo backdrop paper, that expand our understanding of portraiture and what photography can be. Symbolic themes and formal elements such as the void, orifice, the shadow, and the grid, in addition to a heightened awareness of color and repetition, appear throughout Osterloh’s work. Actions such as wrapping her body in tape create an embodied space of refusal, care, and protection. Her photographs often activate the contours between pleasure, desire, and repulsion – intertwined and inextricable through the act of looking. Gina Osterloh cites her experience growing up mixed-race Filipino American in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography and larger questions of how a viewer perceives difference.
Solo exhibitions and performances include her demilitarized zone at Silverlens Galleries, Manila, Philippines, 2021; Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures Generation, 2020 & 2015; Shadow Woman as part of En Cuatro Patas at The Broad Museum, Los Angeles, 2018; ZONES at Silverlens, Manila; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at Ghebaly Gallery; Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Galleries 2018; Group Dynamic at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) 2012, and Anonymous Front at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2012. Group exhibitions include Multiply, Identify, Her at the International Center of Photography in New York City curated by Marina Chao; an idea of a boundary at the San Francisco Art Commission curated by Jackie Im; Substrata with Epoch curated by Peter Wu; Considered Gestures curated by Yael Buencamino at Silverlens Manila; Ours is a City of Writers a collaboration with writer Sharon Mizota at the Barnsdall Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at the Arizona State University Museum of Art curated by Heather Lineberry and Julio Cesar Morales; Demolition Women curated by Commonwealth & Council at The Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Fragments of the Unknowable Whole Urban Arts Space OSU; and several presentations at Art Basel Hong Kong with Silverlens Galleries. Reviews of her work have been featured in The New Yorker Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Contemporary Art Daily, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Art Papers, Artforum Critics Pick, Art Practical, and KCET Artbound Los Angeles. Awards include an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a Women’s Place Research Grant from The Ohio State University, a Fulbright in the Philippines, a Woodstock Center of Photography residency, and a Create Cultivate Grant with the LA County Arts Commission and LACE. Osterloh’s work is represented by Higher Pictures Generation (New York) and Silverlens Galleries (Manila, Philippines). Gina Osterloh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.