

Jamaican-French. Born in Kingston, Jamaica (1981).
Lives and works in Montreal, Canada.
Olivia Mc Gilchrist is a French-Jamaican visual artist exploring translocation and issues of Caribbean cultural identity by proxy of her alterego ‘whitey’s’ placement in the Jamaican landscape. Questioning the shifting categories in which she belongs, from the female body in a postmodern space to a visibly white postcolonial creole identity, whitey questions the role of racial, social and gender based categorization, classification and discrimination in the contemporary Caribbean space. By juxtaposing parallel realities through photographs, video installations and more recently with virtual reality, elements of the tropical picturesque are re-appropriated, and remapped in the search for her cultural identity.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica to a French mother and a Jamaican father. Olivia grew up in France and was educated in the UK. In 2010 she completed her Master’s in Photography at the London College of Communications and, in 2011, she returned to Kingston to work as a Curator at the National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ) and a Lecturer in Photography and New Media at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. Her work has been shown in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Brazil, Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Norway, Germany and France.