Photography is the foundation of Gina Osterloh’s oeuvre. Osterloh's photography, video, performance art, and steel sculptures with text activate photographic conditions including replica, representation, flatness and volume, presence and absence, illusion and the Real, desire and repulsion. Gina Osterloh is a Guggenheim Fellow, awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Osterloh’s photography and live performances present strategies of abstraction, mark-making, the tracing of her own silhouette, and her body bound in reflective tape– to interrogate the boundaries of a body and preconceived notions of identity. Osterloh’s meticulously constructed photo tableaux and drawings for the camera expand our understanding of portraiture and what photography can be. Symbolic themes and formal elements such as the void, orifice, camouflage, and the grid, in addition to a heightened awareness of color and repetitive pattern appear throughout Osterloh’s work. Osterloh cites her experiences as a multiracial Filipino American woman in Ohio as a set of formative experiences that led her to photography, larger questions of perception, and how a viewer perceives difference in tandem with sameness– who belongs and who is considered alien.
Solo exhibitions and performances include Osterloh's first museum survey Gina Osterloh: Mirror Shadow Shape at the Columbus Museum of Art curated by Anna Lee; Her Demilitarized Zone / Image Without Weapon at MOCA Detroit curated by Jova Lynne and M. Pophal; her demilitarized zone at Silverlens Galleries (Manila, Philippines); Gina Osterloh at Higher Pictures Generation (NY); Shadow Woman as part of En Cuatro Patas at The Broad Museum (Los Angeles); ZONES at Silverlens Galleries; Slice, Strike, Make an X, Prick! at Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles); Nothing to See Here There Never Was at Silverlens Galleries; Group Dynamic at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and Anonymous Front at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Group exhibitions include Multiply, Identify, Her at the International Center of Photography in New York City; Not Visual Noise at Ateneo Art Gallery; Ateneo University in Quezon City, Philippines; an idea of a boundary at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery; Ours is a City of Writers at the Barnsdall Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in collaboration with Sharon Mizota; Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta at ASU Museum, Demolition Women curated by Commonwealth & Council at Chapman University and Fragments of the Unknowable Whole Urban Arts Space OSU. Reviews of her work have been featured in The New Yorker Magazine, Aperture Magazine, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Lens/cratch, Contemporary Art Daily, Hyphen Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Asian Art News, Art Papers, Artforum Critics Pick, Art Practical, ABS/CBN Philippines, and KCET Artbound Los Angeles.
Essays about Osterloh’s work are featured in books and anthologies such as Energy Charge / Connecting with Ana Mendieta: Simone Leigh, Gina Osterloh, Antonia Wright, Ana Teresa Fernandez, and Kate Gilmore published by the Arizona State University Museum; Multiply, Identify, Her published by the International Center of Photography; and An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora: Troubling Borders.
Additional awards include the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant for Visual Artists, an Ohio Arts Council Grant for Individual Excellence, The Wayne P. Lawson Columbus Museum of Art Acquisitions Award, a Fulbright in the Philippines, a Woodstock Center of Photography residency, a Create Cultivate Grant with the LA County Arts Commission and LACE, a Greater Columbus Art Council Grant, and multiple Arts & Humanities Grants from The Ohio State University. Osterloh has also contributed writing, including "The Shadow and The Gap: a Rare Look at Charles Gaines' Shadow Series," published by Ursula Magazine, Hauser & Wirth and the essay "Somewhere Tropical" for the anthology California Dreaming edited by Lucy San Pablo Burns and Christine Balance, published by University of Hawaii Press. She has been a visiting critic and guest lecturer at Yale University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Scripps College, Point Park University, Kenyon College, Denison University, University of Cincinnati, Ohio University, Ateneo de Manila University, University of the Philippines, the Arizona State University Museum, Hamiltonian Artists Washington D.C., Carnegie Mellon University, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and University of South Florida to name a few. Osterloh's first artist talk took place in Carlos Villa's course "Worlds in Collision" in San Francisco. Gina Osterloh is an Associate Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.
Additional awards include the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant for Visual Artists, an Ohio Arts Council Grant for Individual Excellence, The Wayne P. Lawson Columbus Museum of Art Acquisitions Award, a Fulbright in the Philippines, a Woodstock Center of Photography residency, a Create Cultivate Grant with the LA County Arts Commission and LACE, a Greater Columbus Art Council Grant, and multiple Arts & Humanities Grants from The Ohio State University. Osterloh has also contributed writing, including "The Shadow and The Gap: a Rare Look at Charles Gaines' Shadow Series," published by Ursula Magazine, Hauser & Wirth and the essay "Somewhere Tropical" for the anthology California Dreaming edited by Lucy San Pablo Burns and Christine Balance, published by University of Hawaii Press. She has been a visiting critic and guest lecturer at Yale University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Scripps College, Point Park University, Kenyon College, Denison University, University of Cincinnati, Ohio University, Ateneo de Manila University, University of the Philippines, the Arizona State University Museum, Hamiltonian Artists Washington D.C., Carnegie Mellon University, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and University of South Florida to name a few. Osterloh's first artist talk took place in Carlos Villa's course "Worlds in Collision" in San Francisco. Gina Osterloh is an Associate Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.
Galleries
Gina Osterloh's work is represented by Silverlens (Manila, Philippines and New York) and Higher Pictures Generation (New York).