Patricia Olynyk’s sculptures, prints, and multi-media installations investigate science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of our place in the world. Working across disciplines to develop “third culture” projects, she often collaborates with scientists, humanists, programmers, architects, and engineers. Her multimedia environments frequently call upon the viewer to expand their awareness of the worlds they inhabit—whether those worlds are their own bodies or the spaces that surround them.
This lecture will discuss a series of projects that investigate science and technology-related themes, including the dark matter concept in astrophysics, often used as a cosmic metaphor for things we cannot directly observe or understand, but whose effects are acutely felt or inferred. Three of Olynyk’s ongoing multi-media collaborative projects -- “Black Swan in Three Variations,” “Dark Skies,” and “The Mutable Archive” -- probe the forces shaping our world, where unpredictability has become the new normal.
Olynyk’s work has been featured in exhibitions internationally, including the Los Angeles International Biennial; the OSO Bay Biennial, Corpus Christi; Vienna Art Week, ORF Funkhaus, Vienna; the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Japan; Museo del Corso, Rome; and The Brooklyn Museum. Solo exhibitions include “A Cure for Immortality,” Center for Contemporary Art, UC Irvine; “Sensing Terrains” at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.; “Dark Skies” at the Art I Sci Center Gallery at UCLA; and “Transfigurations” at Galeria Grafica, Tokyo, Japan. Other exhibitions include Venice Design 2018 at Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne; “Interspecies Communication” at BioBAT Art Space, Brooklyn; “Skeptical Inquirers” at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York; “Splice and Sleuthing the Mind” at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York; and “Interplanetary VR Sustainable Futures,” Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria.
Olynyk received her M.F.A. degree with Distinction from the California College of the Arts before she was awarded a prestigious Monbusho Scholarship and Tokyu Foundation Research Scholarship to pursue her artistic research in Japan. She is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Helmut S. Stern Fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, a Francis C. Wood Fellowship at the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, and the inaugural Medicine + Media Arts Fellowship at UCLA’s Art I Sci Center.
Olynyk has been Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis since 2007, when she was also appointed inaugural director of the unified Graduate School of Art. She currently holds courtesy appointments in Medical Humanities, the University’s School of Medicine, Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Performing Arts, and fellowships in The Institute for Public Health and Living Earth Collaborative, two interdisciplinary hubs that facilitate research across a wide range of fields. In 2023, Olynyk was nominated for a College Art Association Award for Distinction in Teaching.
For the past fourteen years, Olynyk has co-chaired the Leonardo/ISAST LASER Talks program in New York with Ellen K. Levy, which promotes cross-disciplinary exchange between artists, scientists, humanists, and scholars. Her writing has been featured in publications that include: Public Journal, York University: The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Routledge Press, Technoetic Arts, Intellect Press; Leonardo Journal; the Angewandte Book Series, DeGruyter; Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics, Actar Press; and Visions of Scale, Bloomsbury (forthcoming).
Learn more at www.patriciaolynyk.com or @polynyk on Instagram.
