Ottawa artist Olivia Johnston is about to share her take on police violence against black men in the United States with a much wider audience.
Starting Jan. 16, Johnston’s portrait “Olivier/Victor White III” will be featured at RESPOND, an art exhibition hosted by Brooklyn art gallery Smack Mellon in response to police discrimination and violence against black people in America.
Johnston, a fourth-year Carleton art history student, said racially-charged police violence has been such a defining issue in the United States over the past year that “it’s only fitting that an art show should follow.”
“The least I can do is make a tiny step at trying to chip away at this because it really is a terrible thing,” she said.
“Olivier/Victor White III” is one of nine 17-inch-by-21.5-inch portraits Johnston produced for UNARMED, an exhibition hosted at La Petite Mort Gallery last October.
Each photograph in the series pairs the shirtless portrait of a black model with the story of a black man killed by law enforcement officers while unarmed.
The portraits are stripped down, with models posing shirtless in front of monochrome grey backdrops, an aesthetic Johnston said she chose to enhance the vulnerability and intimacy of her photographs.
“Olivier/Victor White III” combines a portrait of fourth-year Carleton music student Olivier Nordskip with the story of Victor White III, who died March 2, 2014 in New Iberia, La., when he was shot in the backseat of a police car while his hands were cuffed behind his back.
Nordskip said he hopes New York gallery-goers look at the portrait and see beyond who he is or who the victim was. Rather, he said he hopes they understand the “blindness” of racial violence in the United States.
“I think it was really great just the aspect of putting our names and the victims’ names together, because I guess you could guess which name is the model’s and which is the victim’s, but you can’t really know,” Nordskip said.
“You don’t know who it is, but the violence is still there.”
Johnston, who is traveling to New York for the exhibition opening, said she’s looking forward to seeing how other artists responded to police violence against African-Americans.
But she said as a young artist—who is turning 24 on Jan. 21—she is also excited just to be exhibited in an art hub like New York.
Jessica Bell, a visual artist Johnston photographed for Herd Magazine last fall, said the Carleton photographer’s success is a testament to her work.
“There’s a lot of competition to get into other shows in other places, especially shows in accomplished venues and places like New York. Whenever your work is selected to be part of a survey of work it’s a huge compliment,” Bell said. “For Olivia, the way that she uses photography—the language she uses in her work, which I really feel is distinct—I think it really holds its own, whether in Ottawa or abroad.”
The RESPOND exibition runs Jan. 17 to Feb. 22.
