Olivia Aguiar is an emerging artist born, raised and working in Tkaronto.  Olivia's practice is interdisciplinary with a focus on digital collage, painting, experimental animation and community engagement. Olivia is in her final year at OCAD University, acquiring her BFA in Drawing and Painting with a minor in Gender and Sexuality.

Olivia's practice is interested in the ontological implications of 'digital corporeality,' or the condition resulting from bodily entanglement with digital technology. Often employing ecological motifs as visual metaphors, central to her work is the "ghost net" (the abandoned fishing net) an oppositional structure that acts doubly as shelter and entrapment.  Olivia dissects and intertwines her body amongst digital and underwater motifs to meditate on the ghost net as a metaphor for the violence and refuge implicit in digital corporeality. Teetering between figuration and abstraction, her works materialize a painted visual language that is distinctly digital. 

Olivia's ongoing research focuses on the implications of 'digital corporeality' after death, drawing on archival imagery from her late grandfather's floppy disks and the volcanic landscape of his birthplace Sao Miguel, Portugal.

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