Sow & Tailor is proud to present Inherited Skies, the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Olive Diamond (b. 1998, Los Angeles, CA, USA) on view from September 23 to October 28, 2023. An opening reception for the artist will be held on September 23 from 2pm - 5pm. Informed by Kabbalistic thought and her family’s unique trajectory, Olive Diamond presents a new series of paintings and slabs that explore the human condition and turbulent imagined histories of displacement, often from a childlike perspective. Diamond models the characters in her paintings from children’s books produced during World War II in the 1930s and 1940s. In Before There Was Lightning, three of these children, depicted as unidentifiable shadow-like figures, play along a windy path as ominous purple clouds hover on the horizon. They fail to notice the imminent danger behind them, instead continuing to innocently entertain themselves. The choice to present these arduous journeys from their perspective allows the artist to mentally escape and reframe the darkness of the subject with bold, mystical landscapes serving as propelling forces. Diamond’s canvases are at odds with conventional figurative and landscape painting. In her large-scale diptych View of Heat, the artist adopts the style of 18th and 19th century Romanticism paintings with her rich and sensuous use of color, bold contrasts of light and dark, powerful, visionary images, and ability to induce a sense of mystery and religious awe in the viewer.
The light found in Diamond’s canvases and the uncommon shape of her slabs are also tied to Kabbalistic ideology, specifically the belief that a higher spiritual power created the world in a vessel, ultimately shattering it with its light. Thus, every part of the world represents a shattered piece of the vessel imbued with the eternal light of God. The tablets in Inherited Skies made of glaze on porcelain recall these imperfect shattered pieces, appearing like archaeological findings with etchings marking the passage of time and the documentation of history. In Arcadia, the darkest of the painted compositions, lightness manages to find its way out from behind the clouds in the sky and peeks out the depths of a cave, serving as glimmers of hope and humanity. Diamond describes the process of making her own glaze for the slabs as a form of alchemy and replicates that “potion making” in her paintings. Her process is an intuitive one; beginning with a hazy idea and resulting in large-scale canvases loaded with swaths of sweeping color and texture. Diamond aims not to take the severity of these migrations lightly, rather she wishes to show how these experiences are universal, spread across various cultures, atmospheres, and geographies.
