Photography is the foundation of Gina Osterloh’s interdisciplinary and multi-medium art practice. Osterloh’s photography, video, performance art, and text works activate photographic conditions including refusal of the camera’s gaze and flattening of the subject, representation, flatness and volume, presence and absence, illusion and the Real. Gina Osterloh is a Guggenheim Fellow, awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2024.
Symbolic themes and formal elements such as the void, glass masks, camouflage, and the grid, in addition to a heightened awareness of color and repetitive pattern, appear throughout Osterloh’s work. Her formative experiences as a Filipino American woman in Ohio led her to photography, larger questions of perception, and how a viewer perceives difference in tandem with sameness.
Solo exhibitions include Osterloh’s first museum survey Gina Osterloh: Mirror Shadow Shape at the Columbus Museum of Art (2023); Her Demilitarized Zone / Image Without Weapon at MOCA Detroit (2023). 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, Artist-In-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California and Artist-In-Residence at Calle Wright in Manila, Philippines. Reviews of her work have been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture Magazine, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Asia Pacific, and Artforum. Teaching and making art accessible is central Gina Osterloh’s practice; her Close Observation of Art & Reading Images workshop has been hosted in collaboration with MOCA Detroit and the Africa-Asia Axis of Knowledge Conference Festival in Dakar, Senegal. Gina Osterloh is an Associate Professor of Art at The Ohio State University. Her work is represented by Silverlens (Manila, Philippines and New York) and Higher Pictures (New York).
