My heart makes my head swim.
Jonathan González and Karyn Olivier
Curated by mai eltahir
Friday,March 7th, 2025 – Sunday, April 13, 2025
Jonathan González, Untitled (Body Configurations) (2025)
Opening Reception: Friday,March 7th, 2025 | 6-9pm | Free-To-Attend
Presented in Gallery 3
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
What if the mind feels and our senses become theoreticians?
Much like Frantz Fanon’s heart aches to write and know blackness from his affective reality, My heart makes my head swim gathers dispossessed feelings meandering and unsettling itself experimentally through our environmental and existential world as it is. Titled from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins White Masks, this exhibition brings together works by Philadelphia-based artists Jonathan González and Karyn Olivier.
González’s suite of large-scale photographs and floor works, from their new and most recent work Untitled (Body Configurations), explores the spectral intimacies embedded within architectural spaces burdened with historical references, foregrounding the uncanniness through the recurring insistence of absence and beauty. Referencing Valley Export’s Body Configurations series, González recasts the body and its shadows and traces as an architectural form intended to extend and destabilize the knowability of self and intimacy within built environments. From black and white photographs to color, celluloid film to digital, staged to improvisational choreography, touching to being touched, as well as aesthetic strategies of opacity to blur that together sample and capture evanescent presences. Departing from legible modes of knowing, Untitled (Body Configurations) comprises textual and scenic scores that poetically use embodiment to reconfigure the experience of absence, appearing as fugitive and transparent. Using metal plates with prompts etched on the gallery floor and sonic activation, González invites a sensitivity to an irregular pulse felt with viewers’ breath that touches the wood and hums that unsettle the air, orienting spectators to become participants probed to body attunement and its capacities to walk and bend towards architecture, folding a few times to become music.
Employing various sculptural techniques, Olivier reenacts and dislodges familiar scenes using salvaged materials and textiles such as worn clothes, plexiglass, and asphalt roofing, juxtaposing them with contrasting layers. Olivier’s Winter hung to dry presents clothes hung on a laundry clothesline appear weighted with ambivalence and stacked with an attunement to the fabric folds then, in that arrest, unsettlingly probes to what clothes us and who is clothed? Is there someone or something lost or found? This site-specific intervention brings forth registers of nostalgia and lucidly unravels the restrictions placed on the viewers’ cultural and historical references, making room for whispers of grief and loss. To further emote continuity and discontinuity, Olivier turns to photography to convey a sense of peeling isolation and distance in Fresco (uncovering), while in (Dis)(Re)(In)Place, she plays with the transparency of the image mounted slightly on a blue mound of sand, bringing awareness to unfixed absences that reside and form in memory slipping into the gallery space. Forged on the edge of feeling black livingness, Olivier creates memory inventions that cohere multiple modes of seeing and feeling and deviates senses to sit with the uneasy and the warmth of the uneasiness. Her practice repossesses materials and scenes and fills them with poetic laments concerning black living and unliving.
Together, My heart makes my head swim becomes a site of absented presences seeking to entwine material and dematerial gestures that intimately animate the afterlives of colonial devastation and loss. Jonathan González and Karyn Olivier recompose senses using textual scores, photographs, sculptural objects, installation, participatory improvisation, and sonic activation. Encompassing the cosmological, the historical, and the intimate, their respective practices heighten diasporic sensitivities. These aural conversations move across and in-between ungraspable waveforms while always appearing out-of-time and out-of-joint, slipping into architectural breaks and signaling unfixed testimonies of longing and desire. By muddling through the available modes of human-object relations alongside the predicament of our ecocidal and genocidal world, both artistic practices bring together multifarious invitations with attention to outlaw and alternative forms of black sociality and livingness that preside within and exceed our human-environment world.
Sonic activations on March 21st and April 4th during Vox Populi gallery hours from 12pm to 6pm.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
mai eltahir is an independent curator based in Philadelphia, PA.
Jonathan González is an artist working at the intersections of performance, time-based media, and writing. Engaging with how the historical passage of geographies, architectures and communities become entangled is at the heart of Gonzalez’s practice. He is a 2024 Herb Alpert Award Fellow (in the category of Dance), a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellow in support of his research on Carnival/MAS Performance in the Caribbean (PRACTICE, 2022), and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts – Grants to Artists (in the category of Performance Art, 2020). He recently completed a durational performance installation at the American Academy of Arts and Letters entitled, Spectral Dances (2024), and was an inaugural Dance Artist-in-Residence under Sarah Michelson’s platform at David Zwirner Gallery (2024). He is approaching the publication of his first book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, in November 2025 (Ugly Duckling Presse).
KARYN OLIVIER, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations and public art. This year, Olivier will unveil a Philadelphia memorial, commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground. Last year, she participated in the Whitney Biennial (NY, NY), La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio (NY, NY), the Malta Biennale (Valleta, Malta), and Prospect.6 Triennial (New Orleans, LA). Olivier was also selected to co create a public installation in Milwaukee, memorializing Vel R. Phillips, the late politician, attorney, judge, and civil rights activist. In 2023, Olivier presented her second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. In 2022 Olivier participated in Documenta 15 and installed a permanent commission for Newark Airport’s Terminal A.
