Email: brand22o@mtholyoke.edu
Olivia Brandwein is an interdisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, NY. She typically splits her time between Brooklyn and South Hadley, MA, where she is a senior art studio major and French minor at Mount Holyoke College. Brandwein’s work uses humor to playfully reimagine objects, interiors, and environments that surround her. Her work has been exhibited at the Skinner Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Pratt Institute.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores how ordinary objects, materials, and built environments can become extraordinary. I often utilize unconventional materials such as soap, matzah, and bubble wrap, to create sculptures, installations, videos, and prints. My work playfully reimagines these subjects through shifts in scale, the incorporation of text, and most importantly, humor. Through irony and absurdity, my work critiques and copes with everyday life, especially during the pandemic. I also use humor to joyfully create new, nonsensical realities by reconfiguring and recontextualizing existing objects. Humor forces the viewer to question why what they are seeing is strange and to shift their perspective on familiar surroundings.