Olive is a visual artist from Los Angeles currently living and working in Denver. She received her BFA from Otis College of Art + Design in 2011.
The bold graphic colorscapes, line-work and movement are referential of Moya’s background in illustration and lettering. She describes her paintings as “abstract storytelling,” influenced by how Frank Stella described his own work, saying: “[Abstraction] could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes.” Moya pairs the soft consoling colors of her childhood with the vivid influence of her early-adulthood in Los Angeles. She uses the pale turquoise of the wallpaper in her childhood kitchen, or the faded nostalgic hues of Disney films on VCR against saturated primaries, striking yellow-greens and hot pinks. The work increasingly explores the manipulation of intuitive forms by mirroring, splicing, repeating, connecting, ending, and overlapping. This process tangles and complicates shapes and line-work that were initially balanced and natural. Lines that creep around the edges of panels get flattened again, like the expanse of valleys and mountains that are symbolically depicted on a two dimensional map. Her use of language and collage also play into the work’s representation of space, time, memories and story. The photographic elements are often sourced from historical archives to comment on themes of physical spaces and the emotional importance humans attribute to them. Like a key on a map, each aspect of the work represents piece of information from a particular space and time and how it becomes altered as it evolves. Olive aims to maintain a balance between the clear universal communication in the way of Keith Haring, and channeling Cy Tywombly’s “human longing to communicate” through “inordinately exposed and even unhinged” mark making. Moya’s work walks a fine line of ordered control and overwhelming maximalism. It questions what we are, if not constructed narratives of the self repeated continuously- twisted and layered over and over.
