Images © Olivia Bee
Olivia Bee
Photo © Lou Bedlam
Artist's Talk: Olivia Bee
Kids In Love
Friday, June 17, 2016 at 11:00am
The Paramount Theater
215 East Main St.
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Book Signing to follow
Exhibition
Reality Show
June 3 - 24
New City Arts Welcome Gallery
114 3rd Street, NE
Charlottesville, VA 22902
Olivia Bee (Portland, Oregon, 1994) is a photographer with a bedroom in Brooklyn, New York, and a life out of a suitcase that takes her nearly everywhere. Growing up, Bee was encouraged to engage with nature and to make art every day. In middle school she started photographing her life -- the one she dreamt up and the one she lived -- and posting the results online. After receiving recognition for her pictures on social media, Converse commissioned Bee to shoot her first advertisement for the shoe and apparel company at the age of fifteen. She has since gone on to create photographs for brands such as Hermès, Levi's, Adidas, Cacharel, Nike, Valentino, and Roger Vivier, and editorial features for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Le Monde, Numéro, and Vogue.com, as well as creating content for select musicians on Atlantic Records and Interscope Records. Her photography has been featured in two solo shows at agnès b, New York, and Bernal Espacio, Madrid. Now twenty-two, she takes photographs all over the world and with her images, continues to search for utopia.
Bee’s work is largely focused on her own life and that of her friends. Her first monograph, Olivia Bee: Kids in Love will be published by Aperture this spring. It features work from two series: Enveloped in a Dream, created during her teen years and Kids in Love (2009 – 2013). Bee’s frequent collaborator and model Tavi Gevinson, founding editor of the online magazine Rookie, writes about the work in this title, speaking to the role of images as social currency in today’s image-driven world.
Kurt Soller of New York Magazine described her work as "dreamy, seventies-inspired photographs of maybe-wasted, increasingly famous young people who just want to have fun," while Kathy Sweeney of The Guardian observed that "Bee finds a dreamlike, innocent colour in her friends' gently dissolute experimentation."
Reality Show, an exhibition featuring the work Olivia Bee: Kids in Love is drawn from recent work and continues Bee’s photographic chronicle of her circle of friends and new loves, capturing both the pleasures and terrors of the fleeting passage of romanticized youth. While the work continues to evolve, what remains constant is her seductive use of color and photographic artifact, as well as the immediacy and charge of each image.
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