PATRICIA OLYNYK

Black Swan in Three Variations

September 3 - October 25, 2025 | Gallery Talk with Jean Mason | Saturday, October 18, 2025 | 4 pm

Bruno David is pleased to present in the Project Room, three video stills from Black Swan in Three Variations, an exhibition by New York/St. Louis–based multimedia artist Patricia Olynyk in collaboration with media artist and cinematographer Adam Hogan. This is Olynyk’s fifth exhibition with the gallery.

Drawing from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s timely and relevant book from his Incerto Series, “Antifragile,” and the notion that individuals can gain from the impact of highly improbable events, this triptych offers three meditations on a selection of black swan events, including the 9/11 attack and its aftermath, the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and collapse of the global financial market, the sinking of the Titanic, and the recent rise of ChatGPT. The score for the video draws from an array of speeches by political figures, AI experts, and members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and explores perceived randomness and variability through algorithmic electroacoustic composition and granular synthesis.

A garden hose in the first display that gradually fills a large vessel with water, where the black swan chaos soon unfolds, is a nod to Brecht’s alienation effect. This unconventional chronometer marks the duration of the work, migrating the viewer between the scenarios that evolve in the second and third displays, and the one that unremittingly keeps time.

Patricia Olynyk is an artist, writer, and educator whose work explores science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of our place in the world. Her areas of research are broad and range from the affective qualities of images and immersive spaces to speculative storytelling and expanded cinema. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and festivals internationally, at ORF Funkhaus during Vienna Art Week, Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne, Venice, the Los Angeles International Biennial, The Brooklyn Museum, the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Japan, the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, Galeria Grafica, Tokyo, the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, New York, and Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. Her writing has been featured in publications that include Public Journal (York University), the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Technoetic Arts (Intellect Press), Leonardo Journal, and Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics (Actar Press).