Oli Sorenson is a French-Canadian artist whose practice, rooted in DJing and music production, he defines as an art of remix.Working across painting, drawing, printing, video and NFTs, he remixes the visual vocabulary of well-known artists into new themes and materials, questioning originality and authenticity amid an overabundance of digital information.
Born in Los Angeles, Sorenson lived and worked in London between 1999 and 2010,where he built a profile as an audiovisual artist, presenting video performances at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Tate Britain and the British Film Institute.He also performed at ZKM in Karlsruhe and ISEA in Helsinki, and later at the Mapping festival in Geneva and the Sonica festival in Ljubljana.Since moving to Montreal in 2010, he has redirected his practice toward drawing, painting, printing, video and NFTs, and shown work at venues including The Power Plant in Toronto, FILE in Sao Paulo and Art Mûr in Berlin.
In 2020 he presented Landscapes of the Anthropocene at TOPO in Montreal, an LED-screen installation borrowing from the neo-geo visual language of Peter Halley to address the ecological consequences of global networks of consumption. The work combined drawings, paintings and video with social media platforms such as Instagram, Vimeo and Giphy, and used custom LED screens built by the Laval-based company Creative Lab.In 2022 he began Nuage, a project pairing acrylic paintings with brief NFT animations to explore how the intangible language of cloud computing rests on a vast infrastructure of physical devices with real financial, psychological and ecological effects.For the 2023-24 “Némo” biennale in Paris, he showed woven tapestries whose motifs, recalling African and South American textiles, depict SIM cards and microchips. The choice nods to the Jacquard loom, an early 19th-century weaving machine programmed by punch cards and an early precursor to computing.
