Olivia Steele

Contemporary light artist Olivia Steele has earned an international reputation for her spirited public neon happenings in surreal environments. Pioneering a new breed of conscious art, her expansive career has seen her impart fragments of handwritten wisdom and wit all over the globe, from Berlin to Beirut and Miami to Mumbai, in the form of site-specific land art and indoor installations.

Her simplistic, interpretable phrases inhabit spaces of contradictory, confrontational, or conciliatory meaning, manifested in multiple forms of light. Always symbolic and sometimes irreverent, her statements suspend time and motion as they crystallize the unity between landscape, semiotics, and spectacle that engenders countless avenues for contemplation and inspiration.

“MY ART IS NOT CREATED WITH THE AMBITION TO MAKE A MARK, BUT WITH THE DESIRE TO ESTABLISH A SPARK, HOWEVER SMALL, WITHIN EACH PERSON WHO COMES IN CONTACT WITH IT. ”

Proving that “it is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors,” Steele’s oeuvre is a synthesis of contrast and contradiction. She encapsulates the contemporary storyteller using the traditional medium of neon to manifest her striking expressions that address the vortex of modernity. 

Her neon works are short, punctuated truths that mirror the ingenuity (or malaise) of the digital age. Her glass acumens are often paired with incendiary imagery or found objects that are evocative stimuli for the viewer. Covert emotions and unforeseen forces also charge Steele’s themes, where her studies into consciousness and the divine pervade her transformative pieces.

Olivia Steele (b.1985 Nashville, TN) lives and works in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Mexico City.